[matsemann]

I'm pretty tired of the "Y made this game in Z tokens" all over the internet last week. They look impressive, and it's cool that it's even possible, but they're useless as games. None of them are any fun. They're like the most boring variant of basic controllers you can imagine. None have any cool mechanics. None have any tweaks made from hours and hours of testing. All have the same cel-shader.

[Aurornis]

I’ll never not be amazed that we can type some words and get those results back out.

However I do agree that the results are much worse when you try to use them. They look great in screenshots and video clips which makes them perfect for content farmers.

All of the LLM generated games I’ve played have been really bad to play, though. I even tried my hand at a simple game, thinking I could iterate on it with prompts to fix some rough edges. After the initial productivity burst every change turned into a slog of tokens with one thing changing and something else breaking it. I would try to use my remaining weekly token budget across Anthropic and OpenAI to refine it at the end of every week but after a couple weeks it felt like I wouldn’t be getting anywhere without scrapping it and going back to having the LLM build it one step at a time with my careful instruction.

Which, in retrospect, is the only way I can get usable output of an LLM for anything complicated, so it’s not surprising. It’s a fun reality check project though.

[techblueberry]

I think it’s interesting to watch that we all have to sort of fine tune our own expectations and build the mental model for how impressive this is.

On the one hand I think most of us are incredibly impressed because we know, that quick demo would have taken us months of work to build in the before times.

On the other hand the promise is a cure for cancer and the end of all work.

So when everyone is telling you “skill issue is why you can’t one shot WoW”. It’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel about Karpathy advertising one shot custom virtual worlds but giving you slop. Incredibly impressive slop when compared to how long it would take to create it just 3 years ago, not so much compared to Elon saying - “by the end of this year, grok will create a version of the odyssey that competes with Nolan’s”

[revel]

LLMs are bad at creative work and I don’t see them improving any time soon. Try asking an agent to write a story about raccoons. It will almost certainly involve either stealing food or raiding trash with a 50% chance of having a character named Pip. If a location is mentioned, it’ll be Elm Street.

I guess this is the average story and, similarly, the average game is boring and predictable

[CuriouslyC]

Ironically, they're getting worse at creative work because all the RL is collapsing their distributions.

[dofm]

Worse in a very specific, bland, uninteresting way, too.

Early generative AI at least had the virtue of relentless, unsettling weirdness, in the same way that generative art from the late 90s and early 2000s did. A handful of people made creative use of that spooky weirdness.

Now it turns out "Airspace" art.

[MasterScrat]

I don't think this is bad. I want tools that deliver what I envision. The fact that given the same input, I get similar output is something I would rather consider a positive. The imagination should come from the human at the wheel.

[ben_w]

While they are bad at creative work*, this reasoning isn't going to show it.

If you took the best, most creative, human writer in the world, and for thought experiment reasons they had amnesia (to mimic AI blank context windows) specifically while you asked them for a story idea 100 times in a row, my expectation is that this human would also give you the same idea at least 80 times out of that 100.

* still better than the mean human, but even the top 0.1% of humans aren't all professional authors.

[emp17344]

Better than the mean human? The mean human creates far better stories while daydreaming. AI enthusiasts have such a distorted view of human capability, it’s bizarre.

[Supermancho]

The qualification "better" is doing some hefty lifting in your assumption.

What you think is better is not what I think is better. Imagination is not storytelling. You ask the "mean human" to write, it's going to be worse than an LLM in spelling and grammar, if you get anything at all.

[superdisk]

Heh, tried it and got a story about raiding trash starring Pip. But yep, I'm well aware of this problem as well. /r/sillytavernAI is a sub dedicated to trying to coax LLMs into good creative writing but it's kinda impossible to do consistently.

[jmole]

Seriously, what is the deal with Pip! I was experimenting with childrens' fiction more than a year ago and 9 times out of 10 you'd get a character named Pip unless you were specific in the prompt not to do so.

[cautiouscat]

I recently saw a study on this actually. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26492

[dofm]

I saw that, tested it in Qwen. Elias Thorne, on the first run, as a clockmaker too.

[dofm]

Elias Thorne!

[josh-wrale]

I think the trick is to use LLMs like scalpels instead of hammers. That said, you can place a scalpel in the hands of a deterministic (or not) robot.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

We're all just impressed that it's even possible. No one is saying these are fun.

I guess the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work with a human guiding the AI.

[Jtarii]

How well encoded is "good game feel" in the weights of an LLM. I am guessing not very well.

[tripleee]

> the next question is if they can be made fun without too much additional work

They can't. If you think about how these things are trained it's blatantly obvious fun is an impossible metric to optimize them for

[egeozcan]

Training impossibilities aside, how would you even make an optimization loop for "fun"?

[tripleee]

Brain-computer interface, maybe. Hook a million play-testers up to the output and have it iterate.

..feels like there was a black mirror episode about that though

[minimaxir]

Unfortunately people are saying they are fun for the purposes of ragebait that goes viral, which is half the reason people intentionally post AI slop on social media.

[Jtarii]

LLMs currently have 0 imagination, I have strong doubts that will be solved any time soon even if they continue to become superhuman at everything else. They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant.

[egeozcan]

> They just have the creative instincts of a 50 year old accountant

That's oddly specific and it'd really hurt my cousins feelings :)

[dofm]

Especially since the whole AI IPO concept seems at least somewhat predicated on creative accounting! ;-)

[eterm]

Right, but the new phenomena is that we've lost a signal.

Used to be if a game looked that good it probably had time spent on the game part too.

[dofm]

And you could almost always tell a "game construction kit" game from a real one, couldn't you? Whatever was missing from those is always missing from these, and it seems just as rare that the game will reach much beyond its origins.

Whenever I think about AI games I find myself thinking about Tiny Wings, Flappy Bird and Angry Birds. Three simple, elegant games.

It is easy to see what makes Tiny Wings so completely loveable — it has a sculpted, adorable, perfect charm with a cleverly inverted game mechanic that has a calibrated level of exasperation and reward.

But why were Flappy Bird and Angry Birds, very basic games with very old game mechanics, so charming?

It seems equally impossible to imagine an AI coming up with a game with the quality of any of them, even with maximised creativity. But explaining why for Flappy Bird seems quite difficult, especially when you consider it uses some stolen visuals!

[knollimar]

it's crazy because I've seen "implement flappy bird on an FPGA with VGA output" as a 2 week project to a human as something immediately understandable.

Maybe it's the smoothness of motion that makes these games understandable and LLMs seem to consistently fail at that. Ask them to do something snowboarding and they go really hard on the physics since it seems like they don't know what kind of approxmations feel good.

[ben_w]

I've been hearing similar from a while back, but the blame wasn't being directed at AI, it was directed at Unreal's defaults now making random indies look like AAA in the screenshots.

(It's been a while since I was in the game industry, so IDK quite how accurate this is).

[throwatdem12311]

It’s called “demo porn” and it’s really obnoxious and borderline offensive to people that take the craft and art form of video games seriously.

If I see one more “one shot MMO” where you just walk around and do absolutey nothing or another menu slop idle battler or rogulike deck builder I’m going to go Postal in Minecraft.

[tripleee]

It's the flashy game/movie trailer equivalent for LLMs. Completely unrelated to the real experience, but good for marketing.

[upmostly]

Unfortunately the Phaser framework has decided to go all-in on this route, and it's really disappointing.

These one-shot products aren't games. They're barely even demos. I don't even know what to call them. For a mature framework like Phaser to sell-out like this and create a vibecoded platform for vibecoded games is shocking.

[moron4hire]

It's blockchain for gaming all over again, putting the cart before the horse.

[segmondy]

you're tired because you lack imagination.

[throwatdem12311]

It’s the people spamming these shitty games that lack imagination.

[segmondy]

people are excited, let them be excited! but more than the excitement is realizing the implications of what this means for building software, first it looks like a toy and then it doesn't. the OP is talking about how the games are not playable and fun. who cares? that's not the point.