ChatGPT and the Future of AI-Generated Games

As a smart chat product, the power of the new version of ChatGPT has obviously exceeded the folks’ expectations. Solving puzzles, drawing pictures, writing documents, and typing codes are pieces of cake, it can also rewrite Shakespeare’s sonnets in a modern style. In addition, music composition, screenwriting, and jokes creation are also a handy thing for ChatGPT. So, can ChatGPT develop a game?

The answer is: yes. In fact, many curious players have already tried it.

The difference between a game and other artistic creations is that it is a multi-modal interactive system. Specifically, a game can be disassembled into three parts for execution: design, development and art, which corresponds to ChatGPT’s specialty are: narrative, code and image generation. Finally, by combing with auxiliary development tools, a game has completed!

Besides, Procedural Content Generation (PCG) can also be introduced in games for creating levels, maps or characters, etc. Recently, European researchers released a MarioGPT model, which can automatically generate Mario game levels with high playability.

In fact, using ChatGPT to produce games is nothing new. From Deep Blue to AlphaGo, AI and games have been mutually successful since the beginning: games are effective tools for testing artificial intelligence, and AI is also feeding back the growth and development of the game industry in all aspects. Broadly speaking, most video games contain elements of AI. For example, by enhancing realistic effects, generating content, balancing game complexity, promoting NPC intelligence, etc., AI improves the overall user experience and greatly reduces the difficulty of game development.

Considering the supply-demand gap between the game production cycle and player volume, automatic generative games have been regarded as one of the most promising AI applications. Currently, many startups are emerging in this field. For example, Latitude, which raised seed funding of $3.3 million in 2021, is a game development company that uses AI to generate infinite plots. Another Lithuanian startup, Gosu Data Lab, is using AI to build a new e-sports information and game data platform, and has received $5.1 million from venture capital.

In the traditional field, game giant Ubisoft (Ubisoft) took the lead in establishing a dedicated AI research department “La Forge” five years ago to explore how to transform cutting-edge academic achievements into practical game ideas. The game platform Steam has launched full AI games one after another, such as the first AI-generated RPG “AI Rougelite”, which has significantly improved the playability of the previous dating game “The girl Does not Exist”.

It can be expected that the application of AI in the game field will give birth to a new ecology with more and more AI-generated games coming out. Thanks to the sharp reduction in the difficulty of development, we can not only play games with AI, but also use AI to make games by ourselves.

Is Creativity of Human Overrated?

Before OpenAI released ChatGPT, the public thought that AI would only replace procedural jobs in a short term, such as translation and clerical work. However, in the foreseeable future, AI seems permeate all walks of life soon, including those known for “intelligence” and “creativity”, like programming and artistic creation.

But in fact, what humans call “creativity” is seriously overestimated. Almost every creative work includes a lot of repetitive processes, and even the “creative” part is mostly a reorganization or heuristic derivative. There are very few things that can be called “creation” in the world, and most of the ideas are only screened out through external advantages, such as having a richer source of information than others, or getting outside attention earlier, etc.

Moreover, handicrafts that used to be regarded as the crystallization of human labor can now be mass-produced in a few minutes on the factory assembly line. Similarly, now we think works that condense with intelligence and creativity will soon be surpassed by AI. From the replacement of labor by mechanization to that of brain by programming, it shows that experiential knowledge, or things that can be generalized, will always be replaced to varying degrees.

It is no exaggeration to say that the AI progress represented by ChatGPT will be a redistribution for knowledge and a reformation in productivity. The former is reflected in the narrowing of the information gap between us and experts with the decreasing difficulty and cost of information acquisition. At the same time, the necessity of formal education is also weakening. The differences in the future will depend more on self-learning ability. On the other hand, AI also means competition for productivity. Game developers who use AI tools may be several cycles faster than those who do not. Therefore, AI will not directly replace humans, but eliminate those who do not have information processing capabilities by improving social efficiency.

Some optimists even believe that the programming languages of the future will no longer be created for CPU or GPU, but for AI programming powered by neural networks. Humans will no longer generate code, or even participate in system design, but simply supervise AI to work in the right direction.

Return to the Essence of Game: Play It!

If AI can also create games, what can human designer do? Our humankind, like AI, are born as learning machines, and learning can be abstracted into three stages in the final analysis.

The first stage is to know things. We need to have basic recognition of things. That is, perceiving the world.

The second stage is to make connections between things. This stage depends on the breadth and depth of the things you have come into contact with in the previous stage, whether you can deeply understand a certain thing and establish its connection with more things. That is, understanding the world.

The third stage is creating things. This stage is to compress all knowledge into elements that we can use for creation. Break the original rules, discover more possibilities, and create your own world.

What AI is doing now is to accelerate our learning process in the first and second stages, and even optimize the quality of learning in the third stage. In fact, a lot of knowledge can be easily obtained only by online encyclopedias and search engines, and now ChatGPT can help us establish connections between different knowledge. While in the final stage, the role of AI should still be a tool, which provides information and ideas, but humans are responsible for making decisions and actions. So, what we have to think about is, how can we be more wisdom than AI in the process of evolution towards higher dimensions?

▪️ Reduce standardization.
It is reasonable for ChatGPT to pass various qualification examinations and language tests with close to full marks. Because this kind of knowledge itself is typical of standardization. Therefore, AI coping with these exam questions is no different from copying the answers. Although AI can generate a lot of seemingly novel content, it just surpasses the very primitive cognition of a single individual. But in the long run, the feeding of large amounts of data may lead to the uncorrected bias.

AI is a product of experience and a model of language. However, it is experience that makes mistakes, and excessive reliance on language can easily fall into the quagmire of semantics. Hence, we have to reduce standardization and remain vigilant about experience and fixed answers. If Einstein was only satisfied with ChatGPT telling him that the universe existed in a absolute space-time that Newton discovered, then there would be neither the birth of the theory of relativity nor the current accurate GPS to help us navigate. As far as game creation is concerned, it requires a non-standard thinking, so that humans can have real fun in playing.

▪️ Adapt to uncertainty.
British scientists have developed an AI system called DQN to study how to make AI beat humans in all Atari games. As a result, DQN performed very well in almost all games, except for a game called Montezuma’s Revenge where it failed miserably with zero points. why? Because this maze game is to die on the spot as long as you take a wrong step. DQN has no chance to learn from mistakes in this system, while in other games it can model optimal strategies through score fluctuations. So scientists have to set each new obstacle in the maze as a point reward, so that DQN becomes “curious”, will actively look for possibilities from new things, and finally pass the level smoothly. This actually imitates the curious nature of human beings in infancy since feeling happy is the best incentive for babies to come into contact with new things. Therefore, the human brain is willing to receive the stimulation of new things. After all, isn’t the game’s fascinating part also the uncertain unknown result?

▪️ Enhances emotional connection.
In the future when AI can also generate games, the most important issue for human designers is how to add human-specific emotional elements. All the best games on the market have in common is that it awakens and fulfills the emotional needs of the player, giving them relief in the virtual world. But for those games that don’t do well may occasionally become popular, because players build emotional connections outside the game by complaining and joking together. Therefore, emotion is a unique relationship between people and the world in the interaction. Future designers should use powerful intelligent tools to realize the emotional transmission between human beings.

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Here, the term SENET takes on new significance:

▪️ Discover the value of the game. Games are common to all civilizations, as old as the origin of humanity.

▪️ Give connotation to the game. Integrate it into daily life like the ancient Egyptians did.

▪️ Use games to connect more people and a bigger world, finally create and remain traces of civilization in our era.

WHAT IS GAME

If you want to find commonalities between different civilizations in the long history of mankind, one of them must be games. why? Because there is no civilization without games. Our humans are Homo Ludens.

All activities that generate fun can be called “game”. Playing chess is a game, playing ball is a game, joining literary or artistic creation is also a game. Nevertheless, all things that seem serious and boring can also be a kind of game — war, law, and religion can all be abstracted into certain rules of the game. So, what exactly is game?

Broadly speaking, a game is a world view, the way we observe the world. Everyone can find the order of world he/she agrees with in a game, but no any game can define the entire world.

WHY GAMES MATTER

Games, though are usually defined as useless, superficial and time-consuming, play a significant role in human life. However, in the Internet age, ever-increasing data show that game industry has formed a huge global market. Players with similar needs in any corner of the earth are waiting for being connected, with the truth of such group is still expanding sharply.

Why are games so important?

In fact, it not only originates from the biological instinct of “play”, but also carries a wide range of social functions:

1. Fun. The pleasure produced by the game process is completely spontaneous since the element that constitutes the game is voluntary participation, otherwise it is not a game. Therefore, games are an act of free creation, philosophically, only a healthy and free mind has the urge to play.

2. Meaning. Human beings are required to find meaning and own an ability to give meaning to things, otherwise life will be lost in a sense of nothingness. From a psychological view, all meaningful actions should be regarded as self-defense that against chaos. Games, and all other behaviors generate fun, essentially provide a “flow” experience that focuses our consciousness and frees us from the interference of the external environment.

3. Cooperation. Another element of the game is to participate in the interaction. Even in stand-alone games, players have indirect interaction with designers through technical carriers. Anthropologists have shown that playing complex games together is a key skill that sets humans apart from other animals. This ability is called “shared intentionality”, that is, the ability to cooperate with others and achieve common goals. It is this cooperative ability to appreciate group goals that makes our social division of labor so different from that of chimpanzees.

All in all, the value of games is that they provide fun, create meaning, and foster cooperation between people.

HOW GAME DEVELOP

The history of games can be divided into two phases: video games and pre-video games. Before the popularization of information technology, games only existed as a small-scale amateur pastime. After entering the information age, computer and the Internet have greatly changed the participation mode of games, and also expanded the social functions of games in many ways.

The earliest video games were born in the US defense laboratories in the 1960s, by curious engineers who wanted to use technology to create fun things. At that time, the computer had just been invented with poor display technology so that it was a big luxury to play games with expensive memory. In the middle of the Cold War, in order to alleviate the huge financial burden, the U.S. government began to consider commercializing some military technologies. Soon video games became one of the civilian technologies invested by the U.S. military. In the 1970s, as the price of semiconductor components dropped remarkably, entrepreneurs smelled the business opportunities that gave birth to technology companies like Atari that specialized in the production of games. In the arcade age, these companies not only applied technology to make games prevailing, but also successfully popularized electronic technology through games.

However, technology is not at the heart of the game.

The huge profits in the game market have made manufacturers only satisfied with imitating and copying existing products, without thinking about how to create better content, even Atari was not exempt. Soon, players were unwilling to pay for the repetitive cassettes, then the entire North American game market fell into a crisis of collapse in the early 1980s.

At this time, Japanese electronic equipment manufacturers are planning how to increase their game business, including technology companies such as Panasonic, Toshiba, Sharp and NEC. But only Nintendo, which started out as a card trader, rethought the essence of the game and took the content of the game instead of technology as a bargaining chip for the industry to reshuffle. For this reason, it bought out “Tetris” from Soviet mathematicians at a large price copyright, then fully devoted to building an IP that belongs to its own game empire.

Nintendo and its developer resources, as well as competitors such as Sega and Sony, jointly expanded the content and gameplay of the games at that time, making Japanese games synonymous with the console age, and sparking global players to follow this trend.

Although technology is not the value of the game itself, it determines the update and iteration of game industry. Every technological innovation will eliminate a large number of competitors and give opportunities to new entrants. Take South Korea as an example, before the turn of the millennium, the video game market was mainly divided by the United States and Japan. Some technology giants such as Microsoft and Apple have strengthened their game business. After the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, the South Korean government began to realize the importance of developing a low-energy, high-tech Internet economy. With the vigorous support of the government, the game industry has successfully grasped the first wave of the Internet, and has gained a place in the field of online game development.

In the past two decades, online games have facilitated the online cooperation and interaction of global players on a large scale, and expanded more than millions of virtual communities. The game “World of Warcraft” alone has spent more than 50 billion hours for players around the world, about 6 million years, which is equivalent to the evolution time since humans walked upright. But that’s just the beginning. With the popularity of smartphones, mobile games have gradually become the main driving force for global market expansion, accounting for more than half of the market share. According to statistics, the number of players has exceeded 3 billion during the epidemic, and this number will continue to approach the total population of the earth.

However, looking at the development of games, whether they are arcade machines, home consoles, PCs, online games or smartphones, almost all WEB2 or earlier games are one-way, isolated and consumption-oriented.

One-way means that players passively accept products from game manufacturers and are subject to the rules and gameplay established by them. Isolation lies in the fact that there are completely isolated systems between games while players have to bear the consumption caused by the differences between different systems, not the other way around. In addition, the production of such games is too consumption-oriented, in order to stimulate players to buy more items and levels, or to draw their attention to endless advertisements. In this model, producers and consumers have clear and unequal boundaries.

SENET: GOAL AND MISSION

Right now, the WEB3 wave based on blockchain technology is reshaping the form of games, resulting in the GameFi model of play-2-earn. In a decentralized network, users can obtain income (game currency) after gaming operation, is obtained, and the game props realize value conversion and circulation in the form of NFT (non-homogeneous token), and finally form an economic system supported by game currency, NFT, and cryptocurrency. In theory, the entire economic system derived from blockchain technology and cryptocurrency can endow games with huge production potential.

WEB3 brings new opportunities to the game industry, but also exposes many problems in the current game mode:

First, the rights of players cannot be guaranteed. For example, game companies have unlimited control resulting in game props and rules can be released or changed at will. Virtual assets are hard confirmed, and the community lacks the power to participate in maintaining games. Also, account security has the risk of frequent theft/hacking attacks in virtual transactions. Besides, the data is not transparent enough, the content/quantity of props and the probability algorithm of the lottery are not fully disclosed. What’s more, the game economic system is isolated so that assets of different games cannot be interconnected.

The second is the “Matthew Effect” of game manufacturers. In traditional games, developing and publishing games is difficult while successful games are even more. Of all games that go into production, only 4% turn a profit, but almost 80% of released games are forgotten and make a net loss. The video game industry in the United States alone is worth $85 billion, but most of the profits go to the top game operators.

The third is the unsustainability of the current industry. The existing GameFi economic model on the market, whether it is a single-token or multi-token model, is only a zero-sum game between players, project owner and investors, but has not improved any social productivity. The end result is that one party will be exploited, resulting in Game crashes.

Based on this, SENET is actively building an aggregated blockchain game platform to promote game manufacturers and independent game developers transition to WEB3 in a compliant and convenient manner. We are also committed to providing players with a truly open game ecosystem, since the relationship between production and consumption in the game will be changed through the design of Senet Network. Our philosophy is “Games connect the world”, by focusing on user experience and helping more people discover and produce value. At the same time, we also look forward to more partner joining SENET together!

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