بایگانی دسته ی نوشته‌های انگلیسی

AI miracles are the talk of the town nowadays and one of the most recent developments in the field is AI dialogue. A longtime dream of gamers has become a reality now: you can talk to NPCs inside video games. Not by choosing dialogue options, but by literally typing to them whatever you like and expecting a coherent context-appropriate response. 

A Youtube channel called “Bloc” has been posting some videos in the past few weeks, showcasing the technology using a custom build story engine that implements ChatGPT in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. 

You can check the videos in the link above, but basically, through this story engine, you can type whatever you like to NPCs and they respond in the manner of a medieval character. One of the disturbing videos is titled Raiding while AI Begs for Its Life – Bannerlord and Chat AI (NOT ChatGPT). In it, the player, acting as a raider, is talking to an AI-controlled NPC, asking him to give him his belongings. When the NPC says he has nothing of value to offer and begs him to be left alone, he types that if he gives his wife to the player and his men, he will be left alone. The NPC says his wife is not for trade and begs some more. The player gives one last warning that if he doesn’t comply, he will start beheading his children and after the NPC resists, he kills the man and starts massacring the village. 

Now that’s different from your average raiding experiences in video games, isn’t it? 

This technology is still at an early stage. The most glaring problem is that AI dialogue sounds too scripted and repetitive. You can try this out inside ChatGPT itself right now. Ask ChatGPT to write dialogue from the point of view of a certain kind of character (no matter how specific) and then ask it to role-play with you as that character. 

For example, I asked ChatGPT to role-play with me as a high-level member of the Sicilian Mafia in a future cyberpunk New Jersey (!). We had a little chat about a mission delivering some high-tech equipment and doing favors to gain his trust so he lends me the help of his crew; nothing is out of ordinary when it comes to simple role-playing. Most of this dialogue could be easily carried by the traditional “dialogue option” method. So I decided to ask some non-conventional questions, like “what’s the meaning of life?” and “what do you think should be done with the immigrants in this city?” 

If AI dialogue becomes a norm in the business, I imagine people will find a lot of meme-worthy material when it comes to talking to NPCs. Like a new emerging genre of clickbait Youtube videos will be something like:

• “I played the new Berserk game and convinced Griffith he’s Gay by Referencing the Manga” 
• “I told Super Mario He’s Getting Cucked by Bowser. Watch His Response.” 
• “I Ask Every Character in Elden Ring III to Praise the Sun and Found an Easter Egg.”

But there’s an obvious problem with this. If we make it possible to talk with NPCs in an unrestrained manner, this can become tiresome really quickly, even if AI dialogue becomes way more advanced than it already is and manages to come up with responses that don’t seem so bland, predictable, and politically correct. 

The thing is video games have become too tied with the concept of progress. When we play games, everything we do is a step towards reaching a goal, even conversation. We might not mind a long conversation because in our minds, it’s just part of the game’s progress. When we exhaust all of the options, we feel good, because it feels like we have accomplished something by consuming the game’s content, which is a dialogue written by a writer and voiced by a professional. Even if the dialogue is as bland as AI dialogue, our cognitive bias of valuing human labor still makes consuming it feel mildly satisfying. 

But the idea of an NPC having infinite things to say – things that are just made up on the spot without any labor involved –  is in direct contrast to this sense of progress. Due to the cognitive bias previously mentioned, we might feel more satisfied going through 5/10 dialogue written by a human than a 6/10 dialogue written by an AI, because the former feels like progress, but the latter doesn’t. So what can we do about that? 

One possibility is that the idea of NPCs with infinite things to say will never take off beyond being a novelty or an easter egg. Video game writers might use AI for inspiration or use AI dialogue verbatim for unimportant dialogues – like those quest dialogues for MMORPGs that already seem AI generated anyway – but they might never actually put AI-controlled NPCs in the game. In this possibility, video game characters will remain the way they were; with pre-written and pre-recorded dialogues and dialogue options you can choose from. 

As an interesting piece of trivia, It’s worth mentioning that the idea of typing anything you like to NPCs has already been turned into a game. No, I’m not talking about the old text-based adventure games that didn’t have any graphics. I’m talking about a 3D fully-voiced story-rich game: the 1998 obscure adventure game called Starship Titanic. It’s the brainchild of Douglas Adams (the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and two Monty Python members. In the game, you’re in an art deco styled starship that is populated with some robots who answer anything you say to them. As mentioned in the game’s Wikipedia: “In order to achieve Adams’s goal of being able to converse with characters in the game, his company developed a language processor to interpret player’s input and give an appropriate response and recorded over 16 hours of character dialogue.”

The fact that Starship Titanic was a financial disappointment at the time of release and didn’t even manage to reach cult status like many of its peers (the game has 77 Steam reviews atm) shows that the idea of AI dialogue never taking off is not completely off the table. The idea of conversing with NPCs – even if their dialogue is written by a brilliant writer like Adams – didn’t seem that exciting back then, even as a well-developed gimmick for one game, so why should it become a trend now? I think no matter how well AI develops, the idea of an infinite generation of dialogue will be off-putting to many people. A limited, linear predetermined dialogue written by a proficient writer who has something to say will never fall out of favor. 

However, it doesn’t mean that AI dialogue will not have its own exciting uses, as long as it’s not aimless. One of the ideas that come to mind is “keyword-sensitive” dialogue. What I mean is you can design a quest revolving around an NPC that is AI controlled; you can say anything to the NPC, but in order to progress by talking to them (in the old-fashioned way of choosing the right dialogue options), you must form sentences that show you have found the right clues related to the plot. 

A simple example would be the interrogation scenes in LA Noire. It’s obvious that this game was trying hard to convey the feeling of real interrogation, but your input is limited to choosing 3 options: accuse, doubt, and believe, usually based on the weird overly exaggerated facial animations of the suspect. 

Now imagine using AI dialogue and AI voice acting to enhance the interrogation system; you could interrogate suspects by writing your own sentences and find the truth using your intuition. The developer could determine certain keywords and key phrases as the way to get to the bottom of a suspect’s confession. If you think someone is lying, you can either expose them by having a long conversation and finding inconsistencies in their speech, or by mentioning a clue that you have found earlier, a clue that proves that they’re lying. In this scenario, the clue could be the keyword that the game recognizes as “progress”. The idea of making progress in the game using keywords you have found intuitively has already been implemented in the 2015 game “Her Story”. But the scope can become bigger and involve actual characters, not just a search engine and pre-recorded videos. 

If AI becomes so advanced that it manages to influence NPC’s action in the game world, you could revolutionize tactical features in games. You can design a quest in an RPG in which you and your companions have to storm a castle. You can explain your tactics to them, give them orders, argue about what works and then watch your exact plan play out. Of course, for this to work, this dialogue should not just be a gimmicky replacement for tactical UI elements. The tactical scenario should be dynamic and be impacted by your direction. If you talk rudely to one of your companions, there should be the possibility of them disobeying your orders and doing their own thing, which could lead to failure or loss of resources for you. Likewise, there should be the possibility of someone ignoring your orders if you are not strict enough with them. You need to be able to figure out these things based on the characters’ personalities. 

Basically, divorcing video games from the idea of progress is going to be very hard and if AI dialogue is ever going to be relevant, it needs to find a way to become tied with the game’s progress. The developers have to find ways to use AI’s nature of infinite generation in accordance with the gamer’s sense of creativity and intuition, not just to fill up space. The examples above are simple ways to do that, but I’m sure the possibilities are endless and will be discovered in the years to come. 

However, AI Dialogue and AI writing can give rise to a whole new genre of sandbox games, games that are not based on progress, but on exploration. If you are following AI news, you might have heard about how AI will make Dungeon Masters redundant and how it will revolutionize Tabletop role-playing. These claims are obviously an exaggeration because the point of tabletop role-playing has always been chilling with friends, but they’re a good place to start. Tabletop role-playing games were always about unrestrained imagination and starting stories that no one could possibly predict where they could go. Thanks to D&D, humans started to experience stories – and high-quality stories, mind you – in a different way. Now the story was not something that a brilliant author bestowed on you like a god, but something that you and your friends made up on the spot. 

As tabletop role-playing entered the domain of computer games, it was forced to become more and more restrained, because the developers had no way of addressing all the possibilities the players might have come up with, especially in terms of graphics, voice acting, and level design. Role-playing games became the same predetermined authored experiences that tabletop was originally trying to challenge. 

But now thanks to AI dialogue, AI writing, and AI image production, we can have a 360-degree turn and go back to the beginning of RPGs: the point where unrestrained imagination was possible and you could experience a high-quality story that was not authored by anyone previously. 

The nature of AI – which is based on infinite generation of narrative-related content – is a hurdle for standard video games, because it will ultimately result in the spamming of content and makes the whole experience feel cheap and recyclable. But as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure: the idea of infinite generation is exactly what traditional role-playing thrives on.

AI is a golden opportunity for tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, The Old World of Darkness, and the rest to go back to their roots and publish something that makes it possible for people who don’t have access to tabletop equipment or friends whose schedule matches (or friends in general) to enjoy these franchises as they were meant to be played. I for one would be interested in a D&D game that is designed to recreate the unrestrained nature of D&D sessions using AI DM, AI artwork, and AI writing, a game that can literally address all sorts of wacky scenarios you could come up with and apply D&D rules to them. I know it’s not the same as gathering around with a group of friends and playing D&D with them, but it can be a great way to introduce newcomers to the world and its rules in a visually pleasing well-structured digital environment. 

If none of these propositions satisfy you, let’s think about the situation in a different way: in the past few decades, we humans have been training ourselves to create and consume “content”. Content is an ugly word because it implies mediocrity. You wouldn’t call a masterpiece you experienced “content”. Content is something that mildly amuses you. It’s something that’s just there to fill up space. In extreme cases, content is something you consume, not something you enjoy. 

AI has reached a level where it can just create infinite story-related content day in and day out. Now just filling up the game world with content doesn’t seem that special. It wasn’t special before, but at least you thought to yourself: “a human labored over this. There’s a part of their soul in it. It’s not THAT worthless”. You can’t think like that anymore. AI won’t let you be satisfied with mediocrity in the realm of creativity. No one can produce mediocre art and writing and call it a day just because they produced content. So anyone who’s in the field of content creation is faced with a dreadful existential question: why should I go on? 

No matter how AI gets used in video games, I think it’s going to have one big effect: it’s going to challenge all the people who produce mediocrity and are satisfied with it. AI can produce mediocrity hundreds of times more effective than any of us, in any field. So now what are we left with? If game developers never find a way to implement AI writing in their games, at least it will have one important use: it will provide a template of mediocrity and blandness that humans will try to get away from as far as possible, because “it’s like it’s written by AI” has already become a critical buzz phrase. The result will either be really bad or brilliant, but it will be human; it won’t be mediocrity and it won’t be content for content’s sake. And that’s all that matters. 

P.S.: It’s also possible that AI makes it easier to create mediocrity faster and more efficiently than ever before, everyone will keep consuming content that constantly gets more dumbed down and no one would bat an eye, because the standard of greatness simply doesn’t exist anymore, no one has the will and motivation to resurrect it and humanity will be submerged in a sea of mildly pleasing mediocrity everywhere, all the time.

But I wanted to end things on a positive note. So please, play along. 

Published on:

Polydin Studios Blog

When you play video games, character design is only one of the dozens of different aspects that shape your experience. But it’s safe to say that the impact of this one aspect can be more significant compared to the others, especially in narrative-driven games. Character design determines how the player connects to the game, and it shapes the overall experience to the point that the player would likely remember the characters the most long after they are done with the game.

Apart from the player’s impression, characters are usually the essential aspect of the game’s marketing. It is the characters that adorn the cover, the trailers, the Youtube thumbnails, etc. So designing a character that immediately connects with the player – even without any narrative context – is of utmost importance. Potential customers are exposed to the general design of characters more than any other aspect of the game.

Character art can take many shapes and forms depending on the overall style of the game.

• Realistic, like The Last of Us
• Cartoony, like the Borderlands series
• Gritty, like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Ethereal, like Dark Souls Series
• Stylish, like Bioshock Series

Another aspect that can influence character design is animation. Things like the way a character moves and interacts with the world can greatly influence the emotional response of the player to the game. Take Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil  Franchise as an example.

In Resident Evil 2, his movement is subject to the infamous “Tank Controls” of the series, walking, aiming, and turning around slowly and awkwardly. In Resident Evil 4, his movement is much more fluid and he executes flashy fatalities and acrobatic jumps every now and then. Even if these two games had the same graphics, Leon would be a different character in each one of them just because of the way he moves. In Resident Evil 2, he’s a scared cop who’s in a horrific situation way over his head. In Resident Evil 4, he’s a cool badass special agent who you can rely on.

As 3D graphics advance, 3D character production becomes more diverse and provides more opportunities for expressing and creating different tones and styles. Take the Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite as Examples. Both games were released in 2013, both have a female side character that the player is supposed to like, and both have a main character voiced by Troy Baker (he was on a roll that year, wasn’t he?) who acts like a father figure to these female side characters.

Both Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite and Ellie from Last of Us have thematic similarities to one another but their character design immediately creates different impressions and assumptions that perfectly match the tone and style of their respective games. 

Ellie comes from a ravaged world with a very real sense of tragedy lurking behind its standard apocalyptic setting. She is designed to look and act like a real teenager. Her face is filled with scars, her hair is messy and her clothes are dirty. Everything about her appearance is designed to provoke your sense of empathy and familiarity.

On the other hand, Elizabeth belongs to a fantastical, idealistic setting. Columbia, the city in the sky that she was raised in, is dreamlike and she’s a manifestation of that. Everything about her appearance has a touch of idealism to it. From her beauty to the expressiveness of her face to the ornaments and details on her dress that indicate she comes from a privileged background. Elizabeth is supposed to inspire a sense of wonder and otherworldliness in the player, a sense that will tie neatly with the narrative in the second half of the game.

Despite how similar the overall function of Elizabeth and Ellie is (a young female sidekick that you grow to feel a sense of fatherly protectiveness for), their character design conveys a different feeling altogether, a feeling that ties neatly to the overall style and tone of the game. If these characters were designed in any other way, the negative impact they would have on the game – in terms of making the player feel disconnected from the world – would be unimaginable.

That’s why when designing 3D characters, it’s very important to pay attention to details like these. There are a lot of games out there with serviceable 3D character designs, but only the great ones create 3D characters that fit all the other aspects of the game and elevate the experience from good to great.

For any character artist out there, it’s almost scary to think how much the success of the game could depend on their character design and character art. This is why it’s so important for the game director to give clear and deep insight to the character artist about the thematic function and the emotional purpose of the character they design. Giving commands like “make it cool”, “make it badass” or “make it cute” might result in the creation of a serviceable character, but not a memorable one. Character design can deeply influence the player’s emotional experience of the game, especially in a narrative-driven one, so it’s only fair to invest in it as much as it has the potential to elevate the player’s experience, which is a lot.

Published on:

Polydin Studios Blog

Game Developers are the new version of the old trope: a starry-eyed aspiring actor who goes to Los Angeles, dreaming of becoming a Hollywood star, but faces the harsh reality of the industry instead. Fortunately, in the game industry, that harsh reality is not extreme, like sleeping with an influential producer or becoming a Starbucks waitress. In the game industry, the harsh reality is much less dramatic and far more mundane: crunch, communication problems, having years of work yeeted and deleted by a greedy publisher who’s obliged to trends and algorithms and knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. You know, that kind of stuff.

The game industry is basically Capitalism on crack, and all the best and worst qualities of Capitalism are on full display here. The good thing is that you can make a lot of money and clout through this industry if you’re on a roll. But once the roll ends, you’re bound to have your heart broken and livelihood threatened one way or another.

This system applies to everyone, from top to bottom. There are so many horror stories about popular Game Developers getting axed in the middle of projects, mass layoffs, successful studios getting shut down just because of one mistake, or even changing trends. There is no job security in this industry, and everything is purely determined by an ever-changing market. If you’re the kind of person who grows fond of people they  work with, this will be a tough industry to be in. Everything is changing all the time.

In this blog post, we’ll go through 10 challenges you need to be prepared for if you want to enter the game industry. This post is inspired by a book called “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels” by Jason Schrier and contains examples from it. This book explains the highs and lows of the game industry through 10 unrelated articles about the development of 10 different games. Some of this stuff might sound too negative and discouraging but remember: every workplace has its own set of particular challenges that are not always present; you simply need to be prepared for them. Our goal here is to help you prepare for what this industry might throw your way.

Crunch

Crunch is by far the most infamous problem the game industry suffers from. Games are very hard and complicated to make, and as the AAA industry keeps getting bigger and bigger, the workload required to make games like God of War or Uncharted becomes more insane.

Some game developers are known to work 80 to 100 hours a week or stay in the office till 2 or 3 A.M. – or both – to reach tight deadlines. What makes this more tragic is that the crunch goes unpaid in many companies. Schrier mentions how CD Projekt Red had to pay the employees who worked overtime on the Witcher 3 because Polish law made it mandatory, but then again, the payment was lower than average compared to US companies. So there’s a bit of a legal gray area here, but complaints about low payment and high work time are common in the industry.

Crunch reaches the height of its intensity before important deadlines, like making an E3 Demo or releasing the game. One of my favorite anecdotes regarding crunch is about Bruce Straley, the co-director of Uncharted 4, who rented a second apartment near Naughty Dog’s office, to stay there during the week. He only went to his apartment during the weekends. He had to be in the studio so often and for so long that it was simply not worth driving back home.

With the advent of AI, many jobs are going to be lost in the game industry and that’s terrible. Still, I’m hopeful that AI is going to decrease the necessity of crunch for those who manage to stay in the industry because crunch is mainly caused by a large amount of grunt work in fields like art-making and coding and the constant reiteration and revision that are an inseparable part of the game development process. AI can take care of a lot of that grunt work and leave humans to take care of the more creative aspects of game development.

Communication Problems

Communication has always been an issue in any big creative project, from architecture to movie-making, and video games are no exception.

Some video games have dozens of game developers working in different departments; some bigger ones have hundreds. If the project doesn’t have a leader with a clear vision, these departments will have a hard time working towards the same goal. If you have ever played a game that has an uneven quality in different areas or has gameplay elements that don’t make sense in the larger context, you can bet that it was caused by communication issues.

It doesn’t help that the kind of people the game industry attracts are usually either shy introverted artistic types or insensitive “facts don’t care about your feelings” technical types, and these people can really alienate each other and exacerbate the communication problem through hidden contempt and grudges. If you want to get into game development, it’s good to work on your soft skills so that you won’t start secretly hating your colleagues after a while. Just like any other field, human emotions (like jealousy, contempt, prejudice, grudges, etc.) can get in the way of good communication and the presence of charismatic, empathic and understanding people who can keep people together can be a huge advantage for a project.

In the chapter about the development of Destiny, Schrier describes how communication problems between the large number of employees who worked on the game caused disaster after disaster in the production of the game. By the end of the production, many of Bungie’s old and popular members left the studio on a rather sour note because the communication was so bad that it was assumed they wanted to sabotage the project.

Having Your Work Thrown Away Mercilessly

The video game industry is the graveyard of dead ideas. For every game that is made, there are ten others that will never see the light of day. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad thing. After all, not every idea is good, but it can be tough if you’re the kind of person who has an emotional attachment to what they make. It’s possible your work and your ideas may be reiterated and revised so much you would barely recognize it.

The thing is, this decision is not always based on merit and quality. Sometimes it’s just based on shallow marketing evaluation. For example, before Halo Wars was Halo Wars, it was an RTS with an original setting. Graeme Devine spent a long time passionately designing a world and a story for this game until one day, Microsoft, the parent company of Ensemble studios, came and said: This RTS has to be based on the world of Halo. End of story. The funny thing is that Bungie also hated this decision because they didn’t want outsiders to meddle with their fictional world. So imagine the kind of position Devine found himself in: not only his original creation was thrown away, but now he was seen as an intruder by the people whose creative work he had to use.

Another example is how people who worked on Star Wars 1313 – the highly promising game its cancellation shocked the industry – spent a long time designing a hero and a story for their game until one day, George Lucas came and said the main character had to be Boba Fett. No questions asked. This unnecessary decision forced them to change a lot about gameplay mechanics, level design, the story (that was revised 5 times), etc.

As you can see, creative work in the game industry is cheap unless it finds its way to the final game. And ironically, good ideas get thrown away in favor of bad ones just because of some marketing decisions that might even seem stupid to you, but you have no choice but to suck it up.

Unpredictability 

Game industry is very volatile. Games constantly get delayed, studios suddenly go through a change of leadership and lay off a lot of employees, popular studios go down under just because the last game they made was overshadowed by a passing fad and didn’t sell well, Studios that no one knew about suddenly become trendsetters and change all the assumptions you had about good game design, a new technology or engine gets introduced that completely changes how games are made and makes a lot of your past knowledge and skill irrelevant.

To survive this industry, you really need to be an open-minded and flexible person. You need to understand that you cannot rely upon any plans, predictions or assumptions. Keep up with recent technological and cultural shifts, and stop thinking too far ahead. Even If you do, don’t be too attached to your futuristic assumptions. In early 2012, Obsidian Studios was working on a secret RPG that was supposed to be released as a launch title for Xbox One. Things didn’t go well, and the game got canceled. When the news was announced to the studio members, an engineer was hired just the day before to work on the game. He lost his gig just one day after getting it. That’s the level of unpredictability we’re talking about.

As Bioware’s Matt Goldman said, game development is like being on the “knife’s edge of chaos.” You either embrace this chaos or get drowned in it.

Financing

I love the opening line to the first chapter of the book:

The most important question in video game development has nothing to do with making video games. It’s a simple question that has stymied artists for centuries and put an end to countless creative endeavors: How are we going to pay for this thing?

This quote says it all. No matter how good a game studio is, or how well a game sells, there’s no guarantee you’ll find a financier for your next game. There are so many cases of highly talented developers with shining resumes struggling to get any publisher interested in what they have to offer. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that the market has so many ups and downs.

Back in the early 2010s, a lot of publishers were afraid to invest in any new games because a lot of market analysts predicted that the next generation of consoles is going to fail and the future lies in the hands of mobile/iPhone gaming. They were wrong, but the situation was so bad that well-respected companies like Double Fine and Obsidian had to resort to crowdfunding.

As a low-level developer, it’s not your job to find financiers for the company’s game. Still, the difficulty of finding such financiers can affect you because you might not have anything to work on.

Dealing with Ego and Office Politics 

This is not just about the ego of people, but the ego of corporations too. Of course, a little bit of ego is necessary to get things done, but sometimes, ego on the wrong person and at the wrong time can destroy a company from within.

This is basically what happened to Ensemble studios. When this studio was established, everyone was like family, to the point that they went to each other’s houses every weekend. But once they became successful and were bought by Microsoft, this sense of closeness was replaced by ego and office politics. New members found the old members to be set in their own ways and inflexible. Old members each developed their idea about where the studio should go and formed their own tribes. They were tired of making RTS games, but that’s what the market demanded from them. Everyone was working on their own prototypes, while a game that was being actively developed (Halo Wars) was suffering from being understaffed.

The tale of Ensemble studios is a tragic one and an important cautionary tale because they were not closed down due to their failure. The last game they released before Microsoft decided to close them down was a hugely successful game: Age of Empires 3. They were closed down because they simply could not work together anymore due to how egoistic everyone was. They refused to help each other out,  formed tribes inside the studio and wasted valuable resources on developing prototypes for multiple projects that could not be made realistically. In the end, Microsoft decided to shut them down long before they finished their last game, Halo Wars.

Dealing with Highly Technical Problems

 

This one is pretty self explanatory. Game development is a highly complicated process that requires a lot of intelligence and knowledge. Assuming that you’re good at your job, this shouldn’t be a problem – that’s why you were hired in the first place, right? – but sometimes, things don’t go as smoothly as you hoped.

For example, when Bioware was making Dragon Age: Inquisition, they decided to use the “Frostbite” engine, the engine DICE developed for Battlefield games. It turned out making a role-playing game with an engine specifically designed for FPS games was not the best idea because they faced so many technical difficulties working with it. They basically had to make some part of the engine from the ground up to accommodate their game.

Sometimes, due to a lack of foresight or perfectionism, companies can make decisions that could put a huge technical load on your back. You need to be prepared for that.

Bugs and Playtesting

There are two kinds of technical problems: 1. those that require brain power 2. those that require patience. Dealing with bugs is definitely the latter.

In order to find bugs in games, not only you need to play the game dozens of times from start to finish, but you also need to do all kinds of wacky stuff to detect them, because bugs could be triggered in the most random way. For example, there’s a funny anecdote in the book about how a Bioware employee became aware of one of the bugs in the game. His 9-year-old son liked to get off and get on the horse constantly. They realized doing this would cause the player’s companion’s equipment to disappear in one section of the game, resulting in the high-level character of the developer’s son being killed by low-level spiders.

If people ever jokingly tell you that “you’re a game developer. It must be fun to play games and get paid for it”, just tell them how bugs are found in games. You have to play the same game dozens of times in the most anti-fun way possible. Hopefully, they will stop making that comment afterward.

Being Laid Off Unexpectedly 

This is an extension of the unpredictability of the game industry, but since it’s such a dangerous and hurtful thing to happen, it deserves its own entry.

Being laid off might feel like a personal attack initially, and it can be hurtful. More than that, if you have grown to like your coworkers, it can make you miss them. But you need to realize that most of the time, being laid off is nothing personal unless your performance is noticeably worse than your colleagues. This industry is chaotic and there’s no other way around it. But the good news is that if you are good, another studio will hire you quickly. So this volatility is both a blessing and a curse; it makes getting laid off and hired back equally easy.

It’s also worth mentioning that this aspect of the game industry is more prominent in the West. In Japan, there’s this culture of corporate fidelity which encourages people to stay faithful to a company and if possible, stay there for the rest of their working life. If you follow the career of Japanese game developers, you see it’s more likely for them to stay in one studio and work with one publisher for longer periods of time.

Alienation 

The Marxists know about this one. Marx’s theory of Alienation goes something like this (taken from Simple English Wikipedia):

In Marxism, alienation is a feeling that people have when they don’t feel connected to the society around them and their work.

According to Marx, there are four types of alienation in a capitalist society:

1. Alienation from the product of a person’s work
2. Alienation from the process of work
3. Alienation from others
4. Alienation from self

Because of alienation, people have no control over their lives or the things they make. Instead, the products of their labor are exchanged for wages in order to survive.

While this theory is not discussed in the book, I strongly felt its shadow while reading it. Imagining all those people who were under the constant threat of being laid off, having their work thrown away, being cut off from beloved colleagues, being overworked, underpaid, working for a vision that they didn’t even understand sometimes… All of these can be so alienating.

One of the passages that really emboldened the feeling of alienation was the one in the chapter about Destiny:

Perhaps the biggest problem was that Destiny still didn’t have much in the way of an identity among Bungie’s staff. “If you were to go to Bungie and ask people what they thought Destiny was,” said one former employee, “half the studio would probably say it’s a Halo shooter, and the other half would say it’s World of Warcraft.” The studio was growing rapidly, which made communication even more difficult. By 2013 there were hundreds of people working on Destiny in Bungie’s unreasonably dark Bellevue offices. Not everyone played the game every day, and few of them could visualize what Destiny would ultimately look like, which led to, as a different former employee described it, “a bunch of great ideas that are all siloed off, and none of them actually complementing each other.” Journalists had left the February event wondering exactly how Destiny would work. At Bungie, people were asking the same question.

Imagine all those game developers in that situation: they don’t know what kind of game they are making, they have problems communicating with other departments, they’re watching old celebrated Bungie members leave one by one, and worst of all, they’re working in a physical environment that is inexplicably dark, as if fate itself is determined to make them depressed. And all for the sake of creating entertainment.

Forget about payments and building resumes. Can anybody feel happy and fulfilled working in this condition? If I were in that condition, I would feel alienated af.

And I think that’s perhaps the deepest challenge you can face as a Game Developer. All of the problems above are tangible problems that you can overcome through practical solutions, but this feeling of alienation that the game industry (or more precisely, the AAA industry) constantly reproduces for its employees doesn’t have an easy solution. It’s too deep and cerebral.

At the end of the day, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels seemed like a strange criticism of Capitalism. I say strange because Schrier’s tone throughout the book is descriptive and objective, not critical. But that’s what makes it so effective. Sometimes the best way to criticize something is not to actually criticize it but to describe it. When you read about how some of the game developers and creative types are treated in the industry, it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

These people are precious. It’s not fair to watch them being chewed in and spat out like this. I don’t want this stuff to happen to anyone, but I know it will. That’s just how the system works. By writing this, I hope I have at least helped someone not to be taken by surprise.

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Have you heard of the Luddites? They were a group of English textile workers in the 19th century who destroyed textile machinery because they believed these pesky little machines would take their job away. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself but often rhymes. Thanks to AI, the Luddite movement is back again, but there’s nothing to destroy this time. You are dealing with an all-knowing, all-consuming digital god.

The protests started with truck drivers concerned that self-driving trucks would put them out of work. But recently, the threat of AI has moved beyond manual labor and is now threatening art and writing, things that are so human we never thought AI could threaten for real.

The reaction to AI in the art community is like that famous Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” No one was talking shit about AI art when it looked like this back in 2017:

People were sharing this stuff and laughing about how they looked like Google’s nightmares. But now that AI art looks like this:

No one is laughing. Now, we’re at the “then, they fight you” stage.

Recently, there was a massive protest against AI art in ArtStation. The main page of the website was spammed with “No to AI generated Images” slogans:

The main concern was that AI art is against copyright laws, that it’s trying to steal the hard work of real artists and produce an elaborate Frankenstein monster – although a beautiful one – of artworks that already exist.

Artstation was quick to respond. They published a statement saying that they’re going to add a “NoAI” tag to the website. If you add it to your art, no AI will be allowed to “collect, aggregate, mine, scrape, or otherwise use” it in any way.

This statement is not as considerate as it seems. This is basically what ArtStation is saying: “This train is going to the top of mount glory. It’s not going to stop, but you can get off.”

I understand that copyright is a huge issue here and the way AI art functions is a bit shady. But let’s not deceive ourselves. The main concern here is not copyright; it’s the fear of getting replaced. Nobody cared about copyright when AI art was terrible. Also, as the ArtStation solution shows, AI can be limited to a collection of legally acquired art rather than the whole internet. That can slow its progress, but it will not stop it. Something tells me that even if the copyright issue is resolved, some artists will not suddenly embrace AI.

So the million-dollar question is: is AI art going to put artists out of work? The answer is both yes and no.

AI will replace artists whose work looks like uninspired AI art already. This is a good thing. I’m sure a lot of the people who are drawing anime girls for the countless Hentai games released on Steam every year are looking for someone to save them from themselves. If copyright doesn’t become a problem, there’s no incentive to hire an artist and pay them money so they can draw an elven forest or a cyberpunk assassin from scratch unless you want to use their celebrity status. But you can’t become a celebrity artist by designing uninspired art in the first place. So there’s that.

Midjourney – the most impressive AI tool that currently exists – has some paid plans, and among the features they provide is privatizing images. So, for a small fee, you can create a lot of high-quality artwork that no one can see but yourself. Designing that phoenix picture above could take days for a human artist; Midjourney did it in a minute. No artist stands a chance against that.

However, in its current state, AI cannot give you precisely what you have in mind, but it can provide a rough sketch. So, it’s possible that in the future, companies will still need artists to experiment with the AI image and revise, reinterpret or redesign it. It’s just that the necessity for designing concept art from scratch would become much less. So, it might make one aspect of your job obsolete but add a whole new aspect to it.

Having that in mind, I don’t think anyone has ever said: “I’m going to become an artist to make shit tons of money.” Art has always been a means of passion for humans to express themselves. But the entertainment industry and its algorithmic nature somehow killed that drive for many artists. An artist working on a big game, movie, or advertisement would probably not feel this is an outlet for self-expression or creativity.

One good aspect of AI art is that it can already provide companies with mainstream algorithm-friendly art that they need and liberate artists from doing grunt work. Some artists naturally feel threatened by this because as much as they might hate doing it, this grunt work is putting food on their table.

But as one door closes, another one opens. AI art might decrease the value of average mainstream art, but it will significantly increase the value of unique perspectives and styles that human artists can provide. In other words, AI will somehow force human artists to become bolder, more creative, and more unique. AI will encourage artists to become visionaries.

In an AI-saturated world, studios could already produce functional and quick art for whatever they’re making; but the market and society will always yearn for that human touch. “A game purely made by AI art” doesn’t sound like a good slogan on a billboard, even if it does look gorgeous.

So instead of sticking to tried and tested visual styles that make many games of the same genre look too similar – like AI already designs them – gaming companies would encourage their artists to develop more unique styles which don’t look AI-produced. Through this process, artists’ skills and vision will vastly improve. Apart from that, AI can be used as a helpful tool for experimentation and reiteration, saving much time.

I imagine the role of AI for artists would be similar to that of chess engines for professional chess players. Even the best chess player in the world does not stand a chance against solid chess engines, but no one has lost interest in following human chess tournaments just because AI can do it better. On the contrary, AI helped humans improve at chess on average and play more exciting and instructive games.

Another point worth mentioning is that quality does not necessarily translate to interest in art and literature. When someone buys the autobiography of their favorite celebrity, they’re not assuming that this is the best piece of literature they can get. They know that classic literature is technically more high-quality and thought-provoking, but they’re simply interested in the thoughts of their favorite celebrity, even if they are a cuckoo head and they know it.

The same goes for art. No matter how good AI art gets, there will always be interest in human art because we’re simply interested in exploring other people’s individuality, even if it’s flawed, amateurish, and weird. The reason is that’s what we relate to. It’s part of our empathy and one of the reasons we engage with art. AI can encourage more artists to be truly artistic by taking care of mass-produced neat-looking art.

As you can see, the advent of AI art is a win-win scenario. In the best-case scenario, it can make your job as an artist easier and help you design better pieces. In the worst-case scenario, it’ll just liberate you from grunt work and encourage you to be more visionary and unique. I know some of you might think: “it’s easy for you to say that. You’re not an overworked, underpaid artist who has to live paycheck to paycheck”, but I can assure you: if AI writing advances to a level that can write an article like this, I would say the same things to myself: it’s either going to make my job easier, or it’s going to force me to become more of a visionary. Either way, I win.

Unless AI actually does put me out of my writing job permanently, with no silver lining, in which case, I apologize to you for not standing against the digital god firmly when I had the chance.

First, they came for the truck drivers, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a truck driver.

Then they came for the artists…

You know how this goes.

 

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Polydin Studios Blog

Violence in video games is quite a controversial topic. Ever since the days of Doom and Mortal Kombat, this industry has been under attack by concerned parents and authorities for corrupting the minds of the youth and normalizing violence. But I personally find that debate uninteresting. I follow the philosophy of Cormac McCarthy when it comes to this discussion. I believe the seed of violence has been planted in the heart of every man since the days of creation, and there’s no escaping from it. The worst kind of violence happened in a time when no violent media existed, let alone video games. Video games provide a safe outlet for expressing violent desires, so they are a great way to contain them. That’s why my concern with violence in video games is not an ethical one but a creative one. There is a world of possibilities out there. Why do video games -especially AAA ones- rely on violent gameplay? Why not try something else? Because, at this point, they all kind of look like clones of each other.

It is common knowledge that conflict is at the heart of any standard story. The most extreme kind of conflict is the one in which death is on the line. The desire to stay alive is something anybody can relate to. So, it’s only natural that many conflicts in stories are about that.

However, movies, tv shows, and novels have the freedom to portray conflicts that are a lot more nuanced than just a “kill or get killed” scenario. They can portray the emotional conflict between family members, the internal conflict of a tortured man with himself, the conflict between different ideologies, or basically any kind of conflict that is considered deep or artsy.

Video games are at a disadvantage because gameplay requires the player to always do something and this necessity for doing stuff prevents this medium from catering to more nuanced forms of conflicts. Even when developers try to cater to nuance, they end up making interactive movies. There might be a lot of emotional details in the cut-scene, but in the game-play sections, you go back to killing like a maniac. ‌This is a problem that Naughty Dog faced when they were making Uncharted 4. They realized that Nathan Drake is supposed to be a lovable rogue, but during gameplay, he is gunning down people like a psycho and his body count would send shivers down the spines of war criminals. It just didn’t add up. So early on, they had the idea to make the first half of Uncharted 4’s gameplay melee only, just to show Drake can change his ways. But this idea was ultimately abandoned. There’s really no easy way to get rid of guns and the flashy action they bring.

In his video “Can We Make Talking as Much Fun as Shooting?” Mark Brown provides a great example of why alternatives to combat are underwhelming. Some RPGs promise the player that they can avoid combat altogether if they put enough points in “Charisma” and “Intelligence” because these attributes turn them into silver-tongued devils that can turn any situation in their favor through dialogue options. For example, there is a mission in Fallout New Vegas in which you are supposed to take care of a guy called Chavez. You can either kill Chavez and his crew or convince him to make himself disappear if you have enough points in the speech attribute.

This might seem like a good example of respecting a player’s freedom of choice until you realize the combat option involves active gameplay with challenge and the possibility of failure, while the speech option is all about pressing a button.

This example shows why violence and combat dominate gaming so much. It’s difficult to make any other action as interesting and engaging as combat. Mark Brown provides examples of some other games that have tried to make dialogue options more interesting and engaging. For example:

1. LA Noire forces you to pay attention to body language and facial expressions to realize if people are lying.
2. Life Is Strange demands that you pay attention to environmental details to make the right dialogue choices when the time comes.
3. Some turn-based games like Undertale and Griftlands, in which you have to choose actions from a menu, turn dialogues and peaceful approaches into turn-based game-play elements, same as combat options.

 

While these approaches are definitely better than a simple button press and a stat check, they’re still a long way from becoming substitutes for combat. LA Noire’s facial recognition system is a gimmick; sometimes it’s so exaggerated that it becomes ridiculous. Life is Strange is an interactive movie and doesn’t use the potential of video games to its fullest. And finally, Undertale and Griftlands might replace violence on a thematic level, but from the gameplay perspective, their system still relies on beating or dominating an opponent; the only difference is that the “attack” command is replaced with “persuade.”

In his video “Why We’re Wrong about Violence in Games“, Adam Millard makes an excellent point about how we should view violence in games. He argues that violence is not necessarily about watching someone get killed, but it’s about the dynamic of domination and “beating” your enemies or opponents. So in his view, Mortal Kombat is just as violent as FIFA 23. I like to quote what he says because I couldn’t explain it better myself:

Games should absolutely cater to a variety of tastes, but I also need to make it clear that games containing violent themes, and games that feel violent to play aren’t always the same, as we’ve seen violence can be used in games that feel quite chilled out and relaxing, and adrenaline pumping combative games can be entirely pacifistic. We need to be able to distinguish aesthetics from how we approach and engage with games if we’re going to get to the bottom of this burnout feeling. […] Whilst violence is a huge feature of storytelling in general, this aggressive, combative focus in games is unique and stems back to a variety of sources, from Nintendo marketing exclusively to boys in the 80s to high-score chasing and tabletop dungeon crawlers being a foundational element of the earliest games to the simple capitalistic reason that people like power trips. Whether violent or nonviolent, the supremacist approach defines too many games to count, particularly amongst AAA developers. And it leads to that feeling of emotional burnout I was on about earlier, as well as more worryingly, giving the impression that this is all games have to offer.

As you can see, he makes the distinction between “games containing violent themes” and “games that feel violent to play” because games in which domination is not the central goal provide a different experience altogether. Therefore, they provide a lot more room for creativity and innovation. These games could feature all the violence in the world, but they wouldn’t “feel” violent. For example, Return of the Obra Dinn is a unique detective game in which you have to look at a still-shot of a murder scene from different angles and determine who was the victim, who was the murderer and how they died. The murder scenes are grisly, and the game’s atmosphere is dark. It’s by no means a game you would call non-violent and family-friendly. But competition and domination don’t exist in the game, even in the form of artificial progress barriers that usually existed in classic adventure games. If you already know the names of the victims and murderers, you can finish the game very quickly.

Despite not being your average video game, Return of the Obra Dinn is definitely not an interactive movie. Its brilliance is not borrowed from other art forms like cinema or novels but is unique to video games. The game is challenging, very engaging and there’s nothing gimmicky about any of its elements. It relies on your intuition to motivate you, not external rewards, and that’s why it provides an experience, unlike anything you might find on the AAA market.

The question is: why can’t the AAA market make such games? Why can we only find non-violent games – according to the definition above – in the indie market? Well, the thing is, this was not always the case. Back in the PlayStation 2 days, developers could make a highly experimental and innovative game like Katamari Damacy and expect to see it receive the same treatment as other AAA games. But nowadays, the industry is ruled by algorithms. With the arrival of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the cost of making games became too big, so the gap between AAA and non-AAA games became wider.

There is a lot of pressure on AAA game devs to deliver something flashy and jaw-breaking. Every teaser and trailer should showcase something energetic and action-oriented with high stakes. This is why intense shoot-outs, epic sword fights, car chases, and other larger than life actions dominate whatever you see from the AAA market. It’s tough to create hype around something that doesn’t look like it came out of a Michael Bay movie.

The state of the gaming world right now is like a society that is on the verge of a communist revolution: the disparity between the rich and poor is too high. On one side, you have AAA developers that soak up all the money and attention to themselves but are not allowed to take any risks because they have dozens of stockholders with a gun against their temples to make them money. On the other side, you have indie games that are highly experimental and innovative but get less attention than the class nerd at the school gym. As a matter of fact, every time these less well-known indie games receive any kind of headline – like becoming free on Epic Game Store – the responses are nothing short of vicious. The sad truth is that the taste of gamers has been shaped too much by franchises like Call of Duty, Halo, God of War, Resident Evil, etc. Basically, any game that doesn’t resemble any of these big franchises and dares to do something new that doesn’t revolve around domination will be treated harshly by the gaming community. Considering how hard it is to make games, what kind of masochist would want to go through with that? That’s why some indie developers might even prefer to stay outside of the limelight and just cater to their limited audience.

However, all of this can change in the next big paradigm shift in the gaming world. Yahtzee Crowshaw, in his video “Why I Think Cozy Games Will Be the Next Big Thing” argues that the success of what he calls “Cozy Games” in the indie market might mean that these games can actually become mainstream in the near future because every time the AAA market needs new ideas to steal, it can always count on the indies.

According to Yahtzee, Cozy games are the kind of games in which the gameplay is reliant on collecting stuff and doing tasks rather than overcoming skill-based challenges. This idea made a lot of sense to me because when I was playing Among Us, I found doing the tasks more enjoyable than finding the killer, and I was annoyed every time someone called an emergency meeting (although maybe that’s because I played with total strangers). This kind of gameplay can have appeal if it’s matched with substance.

Yahtzee points out “Stray” as one of the games that could signal this change. It’s true that Stray is not precisely a “cozy” game according to his definition because it’s basically a cyberpunk action-adventure game, but the reason it stood out was that you play as a cute cat in it. Stray was a semi-AAA game, so the positive feedback it received could encourage more developers to make more games where the main appeal is not domination but something cute and cozy.

Another reason why cozy games can become more mainstream is that for a long time, gaming was dominated by the testosterone-fueled masculine taste and anything that didn’t live up to this ideal was shamed, bullied, and ignored into irrelevance. Cozy games in the past like The Sims, Harvest Moon, and Viva Pinata, were considered to be girly or childish and were an exception to the rule. But this stigma is slowly fading away -at least in the west- and the idea of playing games for the sake of living up to some sort of power fantasy is being challenged. It’s also worth noting that as people’s lives get harder because of financial and social pressure, the demand for cozy stress-free games increases. Maybe the AAA industry notices that desire and starts catering to it by the laws of supply and demand.

But then again, maybe it won’t. The problem with the AAA industry is that it’s structured in a way filled with impossible deadlines and excruciating crunches. As Yahtzee brilliantly puts it, “Five hundred people being worked to death in crunch time are in no position to make a stress-relieving game.”

The violence and domination inherent in AAA video games reflect what AAA game devs go through to make them. So unless the industry is not reformed in a way that doesn’t represent modern slavery, I guess the people who work there can’t make games that are not based on killing, maiming, and butchering enemies. Maybe secretly, that’s what they want to do to their boss.

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