[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.

[mynameisvlad]

Comparing a 2D platforme to a 3D one is like apples and oranges.

They serve entirely different purposes and have different constraints, the biggest one being an entire dimension. Odyssey's mechanic would be extremely dull in a 2D platformer.

Your opinion is also just that, an opinion. Of one person. Just because you don't find it entertaining or think it's worthy of a game doesn't make it fact.

It being relatively popular on Twitch, enough for you even to watch it, is testament in itself that there is clearly interest in the levels that are being created and playing them, which in itself proves the viability of the levels. If they were anywhere near as dull, repetitive and lacking due to the constraints of SMM as you claim them to be, people wouldn't be streaming or watching them.

[a13o]

The 2D/3D aspect is so irrelevant. I could have chosen New Super Mario Bros U and talked about riding on the back of dragons, micro mushrooms, ice flowers. SMM2 could add these mechanics but they by definition aren't novel and combining them will not generate novel content likely to be in the next ~two dimensional~~ Mario game. That game will have a bunch of stuff never seen in any game before.

SMM is not a flop and I never claimed it is. But if the levels are so good, why doesn't anyone sell them and make Mario brother money? Because SMM levels are the 2nd slice of cake.

[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.