I’m sick of seeing all the advancements in generative AI. It seems like every week, there’s a new thing to add to the pile of AI content that tech-bros swear is going to revolutionize the industry. This week, we saw a leaked tech demo from Sony of an AI Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West having a full-on conversation with an unseen human speaker. To put it simply: it sucks.
This demo wasn’t meant to be seen by the public, at least not yet, so its lack of polish and jank isn’t what I’m judging it for. It sucks because it stands in opposition to one of the main elements that make video games so interesting: their writing.
If AI models like this take center stage and end up incorporated into games made for commercial release, these companies are going to discover that people don’t actually want fully AI characters.
People Care About Writing
Well-written games are well-written because a person or a team sat down and considered how the writing would make the player feel when they encounter it.
In Portal 2, when Wheatley says, “This is the part where I kill you” immediately after Glados says, “Oh, this is the part where he kills us” while text reading “Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You” scrolls across the screen and an achievement pings titled “The Part Where He Kills You,” players are intentionally made to feel a handful of different emotions.
This moment can’t be replicated by an AI character because it takes a certain amount of setup, pacing and a nuanced human touch. The joke is funny because of its repetition, because of the way it subverts player expectations, and because everything in the game has led up to this point. The writers at Valve knew what they were doing. It took ample coordination to get right, and it’s not something an AI chatbot wearing Aloy’s face can replicate.
A game’s writing is oftentimes its most memorable element. That idea, however, doesn’t just extend to well-written games. Yes, games like Disco Elysium, The Stanley Parable, The Last of Us, and Portal 2 are all memorable for their superb writing, but there’s a certain level of charm to poorly written games as well that people really latch onto.
“But only if you promise to ride me like you ride your bike” is a totally cringy and out-of-pocket line from Days Gone, a line that someone at Bend Studios thought was great, I’m sure. While that line didn’t help land the game in the “well-written” category, it’s one of the most iconic and memorable parts of Days Gone. Despite its cringy-ness, it helped cement the underwhelming open world zombie title into our collective memories.
AI writing tends to feel stilted and stiff, but what makes a stilted, stiff line of dialogue stand out like the one from Days Gone is the sincerity behind it. It’s the same reason that a terrible movie like The Room has carved its place into film history while intentionally bad movies are forgotten.
Companies Don’t Care About People
Despite my disdain for the sentiment, the tech-bros are right: the AI tech demo is going to revolutionize the industry, just not in a way that is going to be good for anyone other than corporations.
As we’ve seen, AI has only gotten “better” with time. We’ve seen Ubisoft and Sony play around with this sort of tech, so it only feels like a matter of time until it gets convincing enough to executives to make the call for it to be put into games. That seemingly inevitable future is very worrying for creatives and players alike.
Ashly Burch, who plays Aloy in Horizon, posted a video to Instagram addressing the leak, saying that she fears for the industry and the way that technology like this will impact those working in it. While I agree with that sentiment wholeheartedly, there’s one point Burch brings up and brushes over that was quite alarming to me.
She says, “Guerilla [games] reached out to me and said the demo doesn’t reflect anything that was actively in development.” While that statement might mean that Guerilla isn’t currently using the tech as a replacement for Burch in the next Horizon game, it does not mean that Sony’s first-party studios are not working on developing it further.
It’s a tech demo meant to prove the technology’s capabilities to investors and executives and if they think that it’s worth pursuing then it will be pursued. With how much money AI tech can save a company when looking at things on a spreadsheet, there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll see Sony pursue this future.
The problem is that it exists outside a spreadsheet. Just because something saves money doesn’t mean it’s better. If all a game wants to aspire to be is a boring chatbot, then I’m not interested in playing it. By the time the tech is implemented in games, however, I think it’ll be too late to turn back.
- Released
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February 18, 2022
- ESRB
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T for Teen: Blood, Language, Use of Alcohol, Violence