Game studios love AI! The gamers … hate it
Game studio executives love AI slop — because they despise paying artists and writers. The execs hire art directors who also love AI slop: [Aftermath] He’ll just keep prompting an AI for imag…
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I think there is some potential for LLMs in games, in the same way that a game like Façade showed potential for ... being able to create some sort of ... thing. But that would require a little bit of artistic vision and integrity, which obviously AAA studios can't have. I like the idea of games that are about navigating conversation. But I'm not sure you can ever massage a LLM into being in any way compelling—what I've seen of character·ai is pretty ghastly. Maybe only using it as a parser could work? Might as well just be ELIZA.
Anyway, this quote
“It’s very different,” Mosser said. “But for the first time in my life, I can have a conversation with a character I’ve created. I’ve dreamed of that since I was a kid.”
brings to mind a Nabokov quote I think about a lot.
INTERVIEWER:
E. M. Forster speaks of his major characters sometimes taking over and dictating the course of his novels. Has this ever been a problem for you, or are you in complete command?
NABOKOV:
My knowledge of Mr. Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it is as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.
I think it could work as a minor gimmick, like terminal hacking minigame in fallout. You have to convince the LLM to tell you the password, or you get to talk to a demented robot whose brain was fried by radiation exposure, or the like. Relatively inconsequential stuff like being able to talk your way through or just shoot your way through.
Unfortunately this shit is too slow and too huge to embed a local copy of, into a game. You need a lot of hardware compatibility. And running it in the cloud would cost too much.
Or the game could be about a newly laid off worker that has to trick unconscious LLM bots to give them the things they need to survive.
Yeah plenty of opportunities to just work it into the story.
I dunno what kind of local models you can use, though. If it is a 3D game then its fine to require a GPU, but you wouldn't want to raise minimum requirements too high. And you wouldn't want to use 12 gigs of vram for a gimmick, either.
Stayed up last night writing it: https://github.com/zbyte64/agent-elysium
Qwen3 with 5 gigs seems to do the trick but it is slow....
I read the source. It was pretty funny, but I'm not installing a massive statistical word regurgitator program just to run this. I don't want to be too mean about an anticapitalist piece of art but I don't think posting an LLM-based game here is going to net you a hugely positive reception.
That's fair. Personally, I think the game would be more fun without the LLM (what makes it good is the writing not the tech) but this was to scratch an itch that started when a highschool friend messaged me to insist LLMs are just one breakthrough from taking our jobs.
For me it would be enough to make a simple concept game in the style of an old dungeon crawl and put it up on GitHub....
