SweetieGames

As a creative, I feel like we are living in scary times. For artists, writers and many more, there’s a constant looming threat of our work being stolen by AI and used against us in order to replace us with cheaper labour. Gaming has been no exception to the rise of AI; I wrote an article a while back about the rise of AI in game development and how devs are feeling about it. However, in more recent days I have been seeing an explosion of video demos of completely AI generated video games, using popular IPs such as Zelda, SpongeBob and Zootropolis. But is this what the gaming community truly wants or needs?

On a shallow level, these AI game demos also just look ugly. In the same way still AI art or AI videos cannot perfect the medium, these AI games have wobbly janky text, characters who look nothing like the source material, all trying to hide behind fast and fluid movement of the player character. I attempted to get a clean screenshot of the Zelda AI demo for the header photo of this article, and it was literally impossible. Of course, the player character being a popular gaming or cartoon character and looking objectively hideous prompted mass memeing on social media, with many users trying to get the attention of Disney, Nickelodeon and Nintendo in an attempt to get repercussions on those making these AI game demos.

Gaming as an art form is a contentious topic; I err more towards the side of it being an art form in my experience playing some truly incredible, life changing video games. These AI games tend to want to show off fast paced, dynamic and “fun” to play action games, but there’s so much more to gaming as a medium than this. Games provide one of the most immersive mediums for storytelling, music and artwork, and we all know that AI cannot replicate the soul of those things that are created by humans. Games aren’t just about being fun to play, they’re also vessels for us to explore our humanity, feelings and experiences.

Programmes like Nano Banana and Midjourney are currently being used to create these “demos”, but they’re actually just videos. It won’t be long before we are truly seeing our first fully AI generated playable video game, and I think it’s going to take people actually playing an AI game to realise that it’s not a replacement for video games made by people. Leave AI the tasks that are impossible or extremely time consuming for humans to achieve, and leave the creativity to people. There’s plenty to go around!