| Hi everyone, it's Cecilia. This week, we're talking about whether gaming's AI moment is all it's cracked up to be. But first… This week's top gaming news: - Electronic Arts Inc. cut 6% of its workforce
- After its breakup with Blizzard, Chinese gaming giant NetEase is focused on making original hits
- Hasbro wants Dungeons & Dragons to finally make some money – but how?
Everyone's talking about AI right now because flashy new programs like OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT and text-to-image program Midjourney are fulfilling our Star Trek fantasies of interfacing on equal ground with computers. Gamers, however, have been talking about AI for a long time — mostly as a replacement for Player Two.
For decades, gamers have competed against chess players, swarms of aliens and even entire human cultures in the form of intelligent computers. Today when a gamer talks about AI, it's mostly to complain about how easy it was to shoot an enemy in the head. Still, the games industry is hitching its cart to tech's AI boom. At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week, executives were eager to talk about how their companies were leveraging AI. My goal was to learn whether any of it was really new and what, if anything, would meaningfully impact the industry. "I joined King three years ago, and immediately started to think about how we level up our AI strategy," Steven Collins, chief technology officer of Activision Blizzard's King, maker of Candy Crush, told me at GDC. King uses AI to help design Candy Crush's over 13,000 unique and challenging levels and to research how players might interact with unreleased games in development. Last year, King completed its acquisition of Sweden-based AI company Peltarion, which he says would help "reconfigure the organization around innovation in this space." King now has an AI Enablement Team that educates executives, designers and other employees on AI. The thing is that none of this is particularly fresh. "It's more about the gradual and progressive innovation," Collins says. Although King is exploring the use of Midjourney, ChatGPT and text-to-image AI DALL-E, Collins didn't really have anything to announce. So I pressed him: "Has anything really changed?" "This will fill in some of the more mundane work we do," Collins says. He cited level design for Candy Crush. After a designer creates a level, he said, he can "fire that off to thousands of AI bots that play it as if they were human players." With AI, quality assurance is an "automated process," he says — although it's a job usually assigned to people. "You can't ever have a million testers," he says, adding that King does have human testers as well. Rob Schoeppe, Amazon's general manager of game solutions for Amazon Web Services, said something similar. AWS has been using AI to support game developers for years. But now, he says, AI in gaming will "remove the undifferentiated heavy-lifting." If AI revolutionizes anything in games, it may be labor. Instead of replacing Player Two, AI has the potential to replace Player Zero. In January, Electronic Arts published a patent to automate quality assurance testing. A month later, it laid off 200 quality assurance workers. Last week, Google filed a similar patent for "efficient gameplay training for artificial intelligence." The patent notes that quality assurance teams "are no longer able to scale with the complexity of modern games, leading to delayed launches and lower quality products." It's not just quality assurance workers who could feel burned by the hot new thing. Last week at GDC, Ubisoft announced Ghostwriter — an AI tool for writing what a Ubisoft blog calls "barks," or one-off lines of dialogue that non-player characters say in games. Although the blog says it will give scriptwriters "more time to polish the narrative elsewhere," on the conference floor at GDC, game developers I spoke with felt nervous about the technology. Quality assurance testers are among the lowest-paid workers in the games industry. They were the first to unionize, including under King's parent company Activision Blizzard. But there's also a strong argument that AI can help these workers, who are routinely subject to crunch, by making bots do the tedious work. It seems unlikely that the frenzy around AI will revolutionize game development anytime soon. (There's a whole Wired article about that, which I'd recommend). And if it does, game workers might feel the impact of developments in AI before consumers do. What To Play Ahead of all these huge, graphically demanding releases coming up, I am playing Halo 1's campaign for the first time in my life. There's something so pure and unimpeachable about it. The level design gives me that visceral satisfaction of ending up exactly where I needed to be, and fighting just enough guys between there and where I came from. And the writing is pulpy and genuine. In Other News - After almost every major publisher pulled out, E3 announced its cancellation
- Netflix is testing the idea of expanding its gaming service to televisions
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