[kibwen]

> What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game.

It doesn't refute your point, but what actually happened was that brilliant tinkerers found ingenious ways to combine the basic tools to create whole new classes of advanced gadgets that enable styles of gameplay not intended by Nintendo. Here's a playlist with some examples and tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYC...

[levesque]

Yeah OP missed the target on this one. Super Mario Maker is a great example of insane creativity demonstrated by a community. AI can't do that though.

[manojlds]

Point then still stands that if SMM2 itself isn't a hit, MarioGPT cannot as well.

[nextaccountic]

AI can't do that by its own yet.

AI can be leveraged by an human designer to do that with some effort. Like, humans may have good taste in level design and AI may explore the concrete possibilities.

AI might be able to do this in the future by itself

[levesque]

AI models might be able to do this in the future by themselves, though with current paradigms AI will barely generate copies of existing levels with little creativity. Sure, a composition of existing level pieces could lead to an interesting level design, though it would be more by accident than by design. Models do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that. Maybe engagement metrics could be used, but I don't think players would stick around long enough playing bad levels to reach a viable model.

New models and paradigms will come up, but until then I'd say anything AI-generated will feel pretty vanilla and somewhat incoherent.

[nextaccountic]

> Models are do not maximize player enjoyment, there is no metric for that

There might be! Just have some people to play and rate the levels.

I think that doing this would considerably improve the quality of the levels in MarioGPT or other algorithms for generation of game levels

[a13o]

My point isn't that the Super Mario Maker players weren't having fun flexing their game design muscles. My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game. So what hope does GPT have? Both situations have similar design constraints, which I'm arguing is missing the critical design component necessary to make commercially viable platformers.

The reason why commercial viability is of interest is because the article claims this tool will be valuable to game developers and I don't think it will be because it doesn't solve for any problems in the business of making games. Nobody is stuck deciding where the pipes and bricks go.

To end on a positive note, lots of open world games use terrain generators as a first pass. AI might have better luck in that domain.

[mynameisvlad]

> My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game.

How does this criticism follow after seeing a playlist full of creative uses of the limited systems available?

What do you expect, these individual makers using a proprietary tool somehow actually making a commercially viable game out of their levels that they can't even export and are entirely based on the closed source engine powering SMM? That never would have happened because of the nature of the platform, not the content being made.

[a13o]

Nintendo released SMM knowing it wouldn't be a direct threat to the Mario franchise. They were able to guarantee this because they know a Mario game with 80 levels needs 80 things we've never seen before. SMM ships with 200 things we've definitely seen before.

It's possible that some combination of those things is new, and good for a level worth of content. But there isn't 80 of them. The playlist has stuff like invisible pipes, lag spike inducers, soft lock strategies, etc. This style of troll design is popular(?) within the SMM community but you wouldn't sell a million copies of it in its own game.

[mynameisvlad]

> Nintendo released SMM knowing it wouldn't be a direct threat to the Mario franchise.

Sure, that would certainly be a good pro albeit hardly the sole reason as you're making it out to be.

> They were able to guarantee this because they know a Mario game with 80 levels needs 80 things we've never seen before. SMM ships with 200 things we've definitely seen before.

That just plain does not follow. You can do millions of things with those 200 things, and combinations of those 200 things have certainly never been seen in a Mario game.

The playlist has 117 videos. This only scratches the surface of what is possible in SMM.

They are insanely challenging and certainly introduce new mechanics, which is your entire premise, that levels need gimmicks. There are levels that literally take hours due to how complex and new they are. They do things that Nintendo never intended you to do and could easily fill multiple games' worth.

Have you actually tried it out? Played some of these creative levels? Because everything you say makes me believe you have never even opened SMM let alone looked at the levels out there. There are literally tens of thousands of videos showing off thousands of new mechanics built on top of those standard widgets, in tens of thousands of hard levels. Your description of what is out there is just, plain and simple, not reality.

Just because it's not physically possible to make a commercially viable game due to the nature of the platform does not mean that there isn't enough content (and then some) out there made by a million joycons. If a person can make it, an AI can eventually figure it out.

[a13o]

I've played it and also watch it often on Twitch. You can go hours without seeing a decent level. What the SMM community thinks is playable content is very far off what commercially viable content would be. Shell bounces, abusing physics with bouncy blocks, leaps of faith, "be small Mario on purpose"; are all unshippable content, fun only to folks who have accepted the constraints of SMM.

The latest Mario lets you throw your hat to control other characters and there are dozens of mechanics born from that interaction alone, each one unlike the other. SMM has no hope of ever competing with that.

[JacobThreeThree]

>My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game. So what hope does GPT have?

Your criticism is that the AI doesn't create new game functionality, even though it doesn't have access to create new game functionality?

That's an artificially impossible bar you're setting for the AI. Maybe if it did have access to create new functionality it would be able to?

[a13o]

That's exactly my point. The path to new game content can't be reduced to putting the blocks in the right place. You also have to come up with new mechanics out of thin air, consider the educational burden of your mechanics, the emotional tempo, how the level plays for different player types (speedsters, young players), how the mechanics reinforce the theme of the zone you're in, and more.

What I am pushing back against is the idea that since GPT can assemble blocks, that it's somehow approaching game design.

[The-Bus]

> My point is that a million makers on a million joycons couldn't generate enough commercially viable content for a single game.

The toolset is limited, so you end up with Mario levels of LittleBigPlanet.

If you provide a fuller toolset (like UnrealEd or the ability to mod), then you absolutely have viable content, enough for (in the case of CS) the original publishers of the base game acquiring your commercially viable content.

[bagels]

There are more good (and also terrible) Mario Maker levels than one could play in a year.