During the indie dev renaissance in the 2010's, procedurally generated content received a lot of investment and attention. (Today's marketers would call this AI generated content.)
The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players.
What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore.
Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them.
There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts.
The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.
Your claim that people learning to play the game "effectively removes the benefit" of procgen content is false. Games like Spelunky are played by people for much longer than the average indie game precisely because the process of learning the meta-game takes time but is still engaging.
If you want to calculate how much "AI generation" or "procgen" is freeing up resources you also want to look at how long people are playing these games for and how many resources were used in making them. If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources. And this is what's happening today to some extent.
And playing any game beyond a single go-through gets to meta-game exploration, be it arms races for "edges" in competitive play, or learning deep nuances of the terrain/playpen over multiple plays.
The best, most enduring games all seem to have procgen, randomization, or a "construction kit" for slower procgen: player-made levels and curation.
>If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources.
Pedantically, wouldn't that be increasing the consumption of resources defined as man-hours?
> >If indie teams of 2 or 3 can collectively make the world play their games for longer than it plays games made by much bigger teams, then that's a definite freeing up of resources.
> Pedantically, wouldn't that be increasing the consumption of resources defined as man-hours?
Only if you remove the distinction between paid employee man-hours and consumer man-hours (which, economically, is an externality, yes, but generally treated as a positive one, called 'engagement').
While I do hold out hope that procedurally generated _gameplay_ takes off and increases the size of game worlds, I was more just assuming that something akin to deepfake tech could be applied to some of the rote tasks of decorating levels, doing quick first drafts of character designs etc. I'm aware this is already happening for some types of animation and rigging.
I think it's right to be ambitious in the long term though. Procedurally generated levels in 10-20 years are going to be wildly more advanced (and satisfying, and unpredictable) than now. I also wouldn't bet against award winning movie scripts in my or my kids' lifetimes.
I also hope we're very close on good text-to-speech, which I think ought to be transformative. I have often lamented the transition from textual dialogue to voice actors, especially in RPGs, because it effectively limited the total amount of story available, and also killed of all sorts of interesting UIs that existed before based on keywords and even natural language. Coupled with something vaguely GPTish, you could have exponentially more in game flavour, leading to much deeper immersion (this coming from someone who collects all the books in Elder Scrolls games).
Oh true, there's a lot of computer assisted tools for level designers and it has definitely made game worlds feel more realistic. The strategy is to let the computer generate a baseline and then hand-tune from there.
Humans aren't really good at making an area feel wild or natural... we stink up the place with hidden order. So algorithms that generate terrain, tree placement, tree shape, etc are already outperforming humans because their form of pseudorandom is more natural-feeling than our own.
I don't know how famiar you are with the industry so apologies if I'm over-explaining, but check out SpeedTree if you want to see one of these products. It's really cool.
Not only that, but our indie darlings have started to take shortcuts en masse. The promise of roguelike games used to be "no two games are alike". Today, multiple players criticize Noita for not having permanent unlocks. Steam threads like "When does the roguelike stuff kick in?(...)I died a couple of times and I always start from the beginning.". Or a metacritic comment rating it 5/10 saying it's deep and interesting but it lacks meta game unlocks all roguelike games have nowadays. That's what people expect. AAA games are known for usually only having 1 path through the game because "why waste time making content if player won't see it all". Indie developers are actually using the same logic. Why waste time tweaking the algorithm to make unique runs if you can HARDCODE runs to be unique by providing a new unlock every now and then...
Procedural generation tends to spread out content. It's still based around hand designed content and once you see enough of it you notice repeating patterns.
Jevon’s Paradox [0] suggests that it won’t; the freed up resources will just be used for other things.
Tooling for 3D modeling/texturing/rigging/etc is significantly more complex and powerful than it was 20 years ago, yet Pixar doesn’t need fewer artists for a movie today compared to Toy Story - in fact quite the opposite.
AI techniques useful to artists will get folded in the tooling and enable artists to make even more detailed/complex games & movies, but that doesn’t mean the AAA games of 2030 will require fewer artists.
However, talented small teams will likely be able to leverage them to create things that would have been inconceivable from a small team a decade ago.
A more specific version of Jevon's paradox for the VFX industry is Blinn's Law [0] which states that "rendering time tends to remain constant, even as computers get faster."
Tools to make art content have gotten dramatically better in the last 10 years. Systems such as Substance, which create algorithmic textures to replace manual texture creation in Photoshop, have resulted in at least a 10x increase in productivity.
Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)
So, yes, we will see AI in content generation, but it isn't going to be in the form of replacing art bottlenecks. It will manifest in new tooling for artists, who will become more productive, and there will be even fewer artists who have good mastery of these tools, and the demand of quality will increase further. Which would lead to similar bottlenecks to today, though I believe artists will be paid better, and it will become even tougher to break in.
> Naturally, one may wonder if this has resulted in the labor market disappearing for artists. But it hasn't. The demand for high quality art skyrocketed because the tools economically allowed for it. (In some ways the market for artists has gotten smaller, because there is less appetite for low-skill Photoshop monkeys, but highly skilled technical artists are much more in demand, because we are starting to see dramatic differences in productivity between artists just like we have seen in engineering.)
But are the artists treated better than they were a decade ago?
The wife of a good friend of mine is a digital artist. She works on films. The pay in her field is crap, as are the working conditions - meanwhile, competition for paying jobs is fierce.
When computers became an order of magnitude cheaper, the demand for, and the pay rate for computer programmers sky-rocketed. It doesn't seem like the same thing happened with artists.
It's a good question. I don't know about film, but I do have visibility into the game artist market.
The pay is OK but not fantastic: generally in the 60-80k range, depending on experience. Many of the very low paying jobs ($15/hr types) have disappeared. And I do know decent artists that frequently get recruiter calls, albeit usually for a couple large poorly managed studios that have trouble filling positions.
I think it depends a lot on the exact nature of the work being done as an artist. If it's more technical, it seems to demand better wages, but in games there are still some fairly nontechnical roles that are either paid poorly or farmed out to offshore agencies.
Work conditions still aren't great, but this is mostly at bigger studios.
The idea was that your small indie team could keep up with the big content demand since you had algorithms generating seemingly evergreen content for your players.
What happens in practice is that the players begin playing your game at a meta level, learning how the generative process itself works; effectively removing the benefit of procgen content. As an example, consider Spelunky which claims it can generate millions of unique caverns to explore. If you assess that claim visually, it's true. But watch the streamers play and you will see that they 'speak' the algorithm. By observing the shape of a cavern in one area of a map, they know the algorithm had to make a specific concession elsewhere in the map. So this content isn't really procedural for them anymore.
Even if the "AI" content generators get more intelligent, it won't free up resources. Mechanically interesting content, as demonstrated by the indie games of the last decade, is just a different form of handmade content. A designer hand made the procgen algorithms. Players ultimately bond with the designer(s), no matter what meta level they build the content at. In a hand-built game you might start to get a sense for where the designers hide treasure chests. In a procgen game you learn the algorithms themselves and how to predict and abuse them.
There's another form of game content, story content, which remains an edge for humans. Algorithms, or "AI" if you must, can't compete here. It would be the same as waiting for AI that can write award winning movie scripts.
The marriage of story content and mechanical content is a superior game-making formula to the procgen approach. So the _some point_ you refer to is probaby far away still.