Gaming has come a long way since Pong caught the world’s attention. We can now sneer at the 2D rendition of what the game’s creator claimed was a table tennis, or ping-pong, simulation. The graphics were so simple, and the ball was hardly spherical. However, at the time, it was heralded as a breakthrough (which it was), and it laid the groundwork for the video and casino games that are so popular today.
Without Atari’s Pong, who knows what we might be playing on now? Undeniably, it was not the only game in development; any idea is rarely developed in isolation, and often, people are looking for solutions to the same problem independently of each other, without even knowing about the other person’s project.
For example, most people credit Edison for inventing the lightbulb, but he was not the only one who developed the technology. However, Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy, and Joseph Swan played critical roles through earlier inventions and paved the way for him to exploit and patent the first commercially successful lightbulb.
You might be wondering what lightbulbs have got to do with gaming. The point is that many creatives and inventors do not work in isolation and often spark off others or develop what has gone before. Video games are no exception, and the cost of developing them is immense. It could be argued that AI is just speeding up the process and bringing together bright ideas much more quickly.
Many people believe that Artificial Intelligence will help reduce the time it takes for a game to go from drawing board to market. Games companies will also be hoping that it will reduce costs.
A PlayStation game can cost up to $220 million in production costs alone. By the time you add in the same again for marketing, it can cost half a billion dollars, which is out of reach for most companies. Andrew Maximov, who worked in the computer games industry, believes he can bring these costs down with AI and save video game designer’s time by automating repetitive tasks in the development process. His company, Promethean AI, is creating a system that learns directly from the artists so that they can author the automation in their games.
He is reported as saying that AI will work hand in hand with humans to enable them to be more creative. His vision is what most people want from AI: something to assist our creativity and not replace it. Many fear that AI is going to do all the fun bits and leave humans picking up the crumbs.
Maximov does not envisage this happening and is adamant that AI will be an assistant. The idea is that a vision for a game is created, and then the artist asks the AI for feedback – pretty much as happens when using ChatGPT, and we prompt it for a response.
However, he does cite examples of where the machine did try to be ‘creative’ and introduce unexpected elements into the process. AI can have some ideas that might not always be appropriate, like building a police station with a donut on every desk or leaving socks on the floor of an apartment a developer was trying to create.
Californian Inworld is using AI to create elements of its computer games with an engine that allows designers and developers to add realism to gaming realms and emotional depth to characters. Inworld is working in partnership with Xbox to help AI create storylines. We have to say that it does feel more like infringing on the designer’s creativity, and it will be interesting to see whether a game created in this way will have characters with more emotional depth than if made by humans. It’s a somewhat scary idea; maybe more, not less, human intervention would help here.
However, AI is not just being used in gaming development. Chatbots are AI-powered and are a lynchpin of customer services for many Canadian online casinos. If someone is playing real money slots in Canada and has a query, they want to get instant feedback. People have a lot of questions that are pretty standard and can be answered without too much human intervention. There used to be lists of frequently asked questions on websites, but the AI chatbot can just deliver this information in a user-friendly way. It can be annoying when the AI gets stuck in a loop, and a player needs to speak to an actual human to solve their problem, but the best online casinos have ironed out these problems.
AI can also be used to spot potential gambling harms if people are spending too much, too fast, or acting erratically. They can learn players’ behaviour, and algorithms can direct players to parts of the site to help them better regulate their habits. This can include deposit limits, exclusion times and directing players to other external places to protect them from potential gambling harms. While gambling companies want to make money, reputable ones realize that creating dependency and cannibalizing their customers is not sustainable in the long run. Online gambling is supposed to be fun and AI is playing an essential role in keeping it entertaining.
There are also games on the market created entirely by AI models. The technology is still relatively new, and the results are mixed. Most critics are of the opinion that of the very few available, most are not worth wasting your time on. However, there has been some praise for a title called The Girl Does Not Exist. However, compared to what human collaboration can create, the game is a relatively simple puzzle game. While every asset was generated by AI, this does not seem to be a game that will threaten those made with the quarter of a million-dollar budgets.
However, that is for now. As the AI models advance and learn more, we can expect to see more AI-generated games in the future. The question is, where will they learn from? Companies are becoming increasingly defensive about their data being scraped. Media outlets recently sued ChatGPT for using their news articles.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is accusing Chinese Deepseek of using its work to make advances in developing its AI tools. The irony should be lost on no one. These guys might need to up their game!
