Comment by daniel31x13
16 hours ago
Reminds me of a post[1] by Sam Altman in 2024:
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
God what an annoying thing to say. Suggesting that movies will essentially become games, or that future video games will be unimaginably better (presumably because they are driven by generative world models) betrays such a surface level appreciation for what makes art and culture and all this humanity so beautiful as it is.
The entire point of movies is the deliberate choices of the filmmakers! Movies will not be improved by our ability to choose what the main character looks like or add a style filter. Super Mario 64 is great because it is an expression of the very hardware that constrains it. Inevitable future versions where anything can happen because someone hooked the ROM up to a generative world model won't be better for it.
I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
yeah some friends of mine in game dev are a bit doom and gloom about all this and I need to keep reminding them that the hard work is making the million decisions that communicate the vision, the code/assets were never really what people were buying your game for. Even assuming an AI could do literally every technical part of game dev someone (for now) needs to sit there and go "nah this part doesn't feel right" and "that boss 2nd phase opener attack is too long" etc. until AI can also answer those questions and intuit what is good and bad taste there's still stuff for game devs to do. "minecraft in skyrim" is cool for about 10 seconds till you think about actually sitting down to play it.
They're getting surprisingly good at identifying why things don't seem right. I came back to an old game project that I had shelved due to the core game loop not feeling right and I decided to just ask Astra to analyze the gameplay and figure out what was wrong and it was able to provide a good direction to take it that also works well with the game mechanics that were already in place.
The new Terra 6.1 is pretty good at doing user testing as well via computer use, going through all the features and noting any bugs or inconsistencies.
It feels like we might be on a trajectory that takes us to a place where someone can just say "I'm bored, make me a new game" and then provide minimal feedback like "this isn't fun, make it better" and get an entertaining game without a lot of iteration. Of course we'll still have games that come from human ideas as well but vibe games seem like they're here to stay.
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Yes, Opus 5.5 can build out quite a bit on its own that is super impressive when you first look at it. But spending just a couple minutes will make you realize dozens of things that are off.
Sam had OpenAI start the Ghibli style image-gen (movies that are specifically loved for their artisanal quality). The man has patternly failed to read the room around culture.
Why? Customers lave the Ghibli style image-gen.
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the Ghibli stuff was awesome, and I agree with him on video games
> I agree that this technology is absolutely world changing, and am cautiously eager to see what comes of it, but it just bums me out, perhaps needlessly, that the people at the helm can be so artless, unreflective. Whatever.
This is something your average person can play around with. The filmmakers have been fumbling the ball a lot lately (not all the time, though) and I can't wait to see what rises out of the average populous. Lots of crap expected, for sure, but there will be gems in there that I'm willing to bet will blow away what we've seen in the industry. Kind of how indie game companies are eating AAA's lunch lately.
Make something beautiful, with or without the new tech. You and the rest of us will be better for it. And the investors are damn desperate for something to really resonate with the people who experience it.
This. Do instead of consume and we all get a little better off.
We've been living in a world of videogame-like FX movie slop for at least 20 years now, without the help of AI. Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.
It turns out, some people like that. A lot of people like it, presumably because it's fast and stimulating, and everyone's a sucker for wowing FX even as movie FX have gotten worse and more or less converged with video games.
What's lacking in these movies isn't so much plot, it's character and thoughtfulness. They tell us nothing about ourselves.
From an art history class, long ago, I remember the explanation of how classical Greek culture degraded into depictions if "pathos", visible in changes in the sculpture, and how that heralded more or less the decline of the civilization. It seems obvious to me that we've undergone a similar transition. And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art. It's the lack of thought on the part of the creators and the audience.
> Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie... God help you. It's as boring as, well, watching someone else play a video game.
It’s so true. The only time I watch one of these movies is when I’m stressed and exhausted and want something so dumb I’ll fall asleep in 20 minutes.
When it comes to these “worlds” that are generated, there’s no there there. I’ve tried various of these and after three minutes I close the browser. Walking around my neighborhood is a million times more interesting. Whereas the creator-constrained and -designed experiences (GTA comes to mind) actually deliver something engaging.
> Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie...
Why would you look for that in any standard action movie?
Not every movie needs to awaken your soul to some big revelation about the universe.
The industry is called "the entertainment industry" for a reason. People are able to be entertained without deep philosophical introspection.
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> And the thing is, it's not the technology itself, which could be used to produce meaningful art.
Exactly. I am not de-facto against the use of AI in art. But artful use of the medium is sparse at the moment.
And then look into all the good movies in Cannes every year. Or subgenres even in us such as horror. Very far away from slop...
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That’s what led me back to books. Character, plot, ideas, coherence. I also love great prose.
You occasionally see thoughtful movies. Many of them are unsurprisingly based on books. The horror genre has become this weird eddy of creativity too with interesting characters and plots and some surprisingly good acting. Of course you’ve historically had innovation in that genre, often ignored because it’s horror and thus low brow by definition.
My take on horror being creative is that it’s like old school punk, pulp novels, zines, underground music. The key there is that these are genres and styles that give you permission to suck, and therefore permission to try stuff.
If it must be high art or it must gross nine figures, you can’t suck. So you can’t innovate.
>Try to find insightful reflection of humanity and truth in a Marvel movie...
I can name several, as well as something profound to be discovered in the execution of the MCU as a whole, but perhaps more salient is why so many people feel the need to tear down the straw man version of Marvel that they have in their minds.
...Oh, fine, I'll give you one:
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Radio -> Silent Movies -> Talkies -> Movies -> Video Games -> ? Why is this annoying? We are moving toward greater immersion through technology.
Those are just five separate things. Putting arrows between them in the order that an immersion-seeker might rank them doesn’t mean that it’s actually one thing that became each of the five things, it just means your ability to appreciate those things is limited to “how much can this technology immerse me (or someone else whose money I want)”. This is annoying and artless and leads to claims of “no appreciation for the thing”.
They are all capable of art. Sam Altman saying how things will be in the future of two mediums he doesn’t work in says something very loudly. You just have to choose which thing it is.
Because radio is not the ancestor of video games. Even if you wanted to make the case, it will be painting -> photography -> silent movies... not radio. You can't bunch two different disciplines as related to each other like this even if both of them are art forms.
We still have podcasts but you think radio led to video games?
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This is the trend of available technology, not a ranking of any particular entry. A great radio show will not automatically make a great movie, for instance.
As an example, while Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is available in at least 6 different forms of media, the movie is by far the worst.
Except that movies don’t replace video games. They’re entirely different mediums.
The Orville show explores this idea, before LLMs became a thing. Simulators become the replacement for movies, but the simulations are still designed by a person (or alien).
The concept feels more like a video game than a movie in the show, but presumably you could program the simulation to happen around you instead of you moving through it.
there was a TV commercial in the 1970s that suggested this would happen in the future. Knowing Seth MacFarlane, that's where he got the idea.
Do you think that Super Mario Odyssey is better than Super Mario Bros for the NES? Is Breath of the Wild better than the Legend of Zelda? I mean -- take off your nostalgia-covered glasses and imagine if you handed them both to a kid who had seen neither which one they might be more interested in. Why do you think that is?
Is your contention better graphics are implicitly better? Does this mean movies in color are better than any movie in black and white? Also, are kids an amorphous blob? How should I know what a kid might like better?
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Odyssey is better than SMB, but OOT-WW-TP are all better than BOTW (I consider it and TOTK to be the worst games in the series).
I understand but I wouldn't dismiss how consumer choices already contribute to this
Younger people I know, and market to sometimes, literally avoid "plot based media" in favor of brainrot. Akin to what my generation used to call "sooo random"
People catering to it earn a lot. They don't identify as directors, but they are. They don't identify as artists either. They identify as influencers and brands.
You will never be the generation they engage with. I don't expect to base any of my choices in following trends looking for opportunities to be contingent on your affinity for movies and first/third person games.
Even when it comes to spending, they are a powerhouse because parents nationwide and worldwide give them their weekly allowances in platform credits, with no further accountability on how it's spent. There is a large audience already, trends that are full economies within a few months instead of needing to wait an entire 12 to 20 year generation for the audience to have independent purchasing power.
That's what is happening and why someone with even greater perception than me would say things that seem out of touch, but are closer to reality than you'd realize.
“Plot based media” you actually heard someone say this? Like it was a bad thing?
GenZ is culturally destitute. It’s shocking and sad. Every time I think no I must just be old and I don’t know, I go and dig and… very little. There’s just not much there except brain rot and blather and music that’s absolutely derivative of previous music at best. At worst it’s musical brainrot, like “phonk” inspired stuff.
I fear GenA will largely be in the same boat.
It’s scrolling and algorithms. People blast weapons companies and stuff like Palantir or Flock or whatever here, and for rational reasons, but infinite scroll plus engagement algorithms has done more harm to humanity at scale than any of those.
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Some movies and some games (or parts of games) really are just for fun. Eg a lot of Bethesda games would improve if you could do a randomly generated storyline on your 4th playthrough, and WoW has 0 storyline to their dailies. It could be kind of fun like a fortune cookie to get a random story. I don't expect art, but it'd be funny to see if it made up a meme-able story.
An awful lot of mainstream movies do have fairly trite plots, with a predictable film style. That's not entirely hate, sometimes I really want to see Michael Bay blow up half of LA. I don't think the next Fast and Furious movie would suffer horribly from AI writing, it's never really been an "art" kind of series anyways.
That reminds me, has anyone made Ow! My Balls! using AI video gen?
> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
Sounds glib, but honestly ... more Ads :/
And they will be so severely targeted to you that you won't be able to identify that they are designed to influence your purchasing or voting decisions. And they will be of production quality rivaling the highest budget films - rendered on your own hardware.
The gameplay _becomes_ the ad. If you have a full sash of potions in every slot, they spell "C","O","K","E". The monster-bashing sounds sound like onomatopoetic "Apple!" "Goog!". The armor colors are the same as the NFL teams nearest your locale!
It will be a nightmare! haha
Every ad since the dawn of time was designed to influence your purchasing decisions
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Subtle product placements tailored specifically for you will be injected into movies and TV
Dont be silly, it will be on the companies hardware. We're pushed to a rent to "use" model in so many things now.
That’s optimistic, assuming we are still valuable as consumers.
Such a boring knee jerk reaction to things.
In what sense, the commenter .. or the reality of Ads?
So, people will be able to completely skip living in the real world, and instead spend their entire time plugged into a simulation, like a vegetable.
Sounds wonderful. May as well skip this and just spend my life hooked up to an IV drip of drugs.
Sounds like the plot from the movie matrix. Only difference between the movie and our real timeline - the ai didn't need to enslave humans, we willingly chose enslavement by ai for ourselves by continuing our google subscription.
It also sounds like Ready Player One, where the real world is so shit, everyone spends all their time in VR, using rented equipment, making nearly everyone a slave to the corporations.
The people building AI must be deeply unhappy, and won't be satisfied until they impose their misery on everyone.
Ultra nerdy point: in the matrix it’s revealed that humans did in fact choose to join it. And the meta point was that most of them still would choose it over reality [1] every day.
[1] reality is also somewhat in question in the films universe
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People already do this in many video games. The simulation isn't perfect, and maybe there's a tipping point where the simulation becomes real enough that it (maybe) supplants "reality". In a sense, this is disintermediation: instead of actually riding horse, I can ride a virtual dragon. Does that make it worse, or problematic? Again, we already have this, for driving race cars, fighting in wars, etc. etc. It's just a matter of fidelity and immersion?
There's also all the ancillary activities.
Riding a real horse isn't just about the horse ride, right? It's about the trip to the horse farm. The small but real danger. If you're doing it on some sort of multi-day trip, it's about the memories you make with others, the romantic time spent with your partner at night, or if you're single maybe the hope of meeting a romantic partner. For some maybe it's even about doing things like cleaning the stables, which isn't intrinsically fun, but probably adds to the feeling of bonding with the horses.
(I've never ridden a horse. I'm surely wrong about some of those things)
There's also the "abundance issue" with simulations. Have you ever looked at your unplayed games on Steam, or a folder full of ROMs, and just had a hard time choosing or enjoying anything, because (a) there's so much there, nothing feels special and (b) even when you're enjoying one game, part of you is thinking that perhaps the next game is even better?
If things truly progress to Matrix-style simulation, I guess a lot of that is "solvable" by "just" manipulating/injecting memories. But I think that's how far a simulation would need to go in order to supplant real life experiences entirely.
Or, there's the even darker route, also explored by much scifi -- reality gets so shitty that nobody can really even aspire to an actual horse ride anyway, so simulations are all anybody has. A lot of people already live some kind of version of this anyway due to lack of funds.
Sorry for no coherent point. Just rambling!
People do it in all forms of “cinematic world building” including amusement parks, vacations, games books movies etc.
Reality is very much blurry
The Bliss IV is an upcharge subscription, though.
This is why UBI bad.
This is the worst philosophy course I have ever surveyed. Explain further. Your contention is that, given money people didn’t “earn” they will immediately do drugs?
Yes, but the other three options are AI failing naturally, AI being stopped, or people being unable to participate in the economy without UBI and starving.
Right now we're fully on track for one of several dystopias.
For some... that is sadly a better existence in cases.
Video games are already movies that are video games.
The ending cutscene of Metal Gear Solid 4 alone is a full feature-length film.
(And it’s annoying as hell if you actually want to play a game rather than watch a movie.)
There’s no end to games with near or actually 0 story/narrative.
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It will lead to garbage.
Also, does anyone want movies to become games? I don't. I want movies to be movies. Good movies. With interesting stories, beautiful artistic cinematography, great characters, moving paintings as Lynch said it.
If I want games, I'll play games.
People still love oral story telling (standup). Adding more immersion doesn't necessarily enhance the experience.
For me, this does nothing. I am attracted to film and gaming for the artistry and deliberate choices made by the authors. A synthetic approach may be stimulating but I find it ultimately void.
10yrs isn't far enough. 2016 wasn't that different from today relative to media.
We’ve seen a lot of changes since 2016 including the rise of short form video, podcasts, audiobooks, music streaming, substack, even vinyl is up 3x (!)
Practically nobody consumed short form TikTok-like media in 2016. Now it's a highly dominant type of media.
Untrue. Insta stories were pervasive.
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BS, People already binge watching youtube back in the day. It's just the content is not as toxic as it is recently
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All the kids were on Vine back then, weren't they?
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Like, movies sometimes have alternate endings. What if they were more choice driven, and replayable. Video games have remarkably dumb ideas that keep persisting, like you can encapsulate all that is “Health” as an integer. Instead games can be an aggregation of entity bound micro-simulation that create emergent scenarios, yet follow the laws of narrative collectively. Games that build themselves. Worlds within worlds kinda jazz.
> movies are going to become video games and video games are going to become something unimaginably better
This is the kind of detached from reality, devoid of humanity statement only a tech bro could come up with.
It boggles the mind how these people can be so dumb. He literally does not understand why people enjoy movies.
Maybe you need a mirror. People are literally watching AI generated soap operas that have gone viral. Perhaps it's your lack of understanding that frustrates you
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I for one would love to be able to experience Godzilla Minus Zero interactively. I get that it's different from movies. I remember seeing Avatar in 3-D and realizing that James Cameron was directing the audience's attention to a particular part of a scene by the way the 3-D focused, and it was a little off-putting at times. That's a small thing compared to what will be possible in a few years, but still -- being immersed in Avatar will be an amazing experience. I'd also love to see a version of Avatar written by '80s James Cameron -- he was a much better writer back then -- or maybe other, more skillful writers had greater influence on him? In any case, it's inarguable that Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, and Terminator 2 are all better written than the Avatar films.
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> Sometimes I really wanna skip 10 years into the future and see where all this eventually leads.
Either the desert of the real, or something unimaginable to Mk 1 humans.
Great, I guess I can say bye bye to movies
With VR coming and then going technology has shown itself to hold within it no more immersive capability than a good book. It is not about rendering firepower it is about hitting the right notes.
Type of thing he would say.
Llms wont be able to create good games. Consider for a sec that there's like 500 "Great" games ever made, maybe more but not much, in some genres that number is less than 10. There is no training data, and its largely a matter of taste and culture that cant be represented/distilled into vector embeddings.
While i generally agree, some of this tech could be a major force multiplier and lower the barriers to entry.
Even if you have a great game idea, it takes a ton of time and money to even get it off the ground, let alone get it coded correctly and maybe get the reach you want. A LOT of flash in the pan ideas probably fizzled out faster than they needed (most recently Among Us and Fall Guys come to mind) because they were built to ship, not to easily modify.
Tech like this could lower the barrier to smaller and more creative teams or even individuals and get some better competition in the area. Fighting games KNEW that rollback was the way looooooong before AAA bit the bullet and started making it standard, and they still fuck it up (and it probably would've taken longer if COVID didn't force the issue and punish those lagging).
That said 2 of the largest hurdles i've seen in everyone's "magically ideal" game are enemy AI and Plot.
Interesting and well designed enemy AI is still hard, and even games that did it well built the whole game around it (FEAR) and the system is vastly less impressive without that focus (Just Cause). I don't think we're anywhere near modern AI solving the issue of making a good AI system for a game due to design space problems, but it might.
Plot though...that's tricky. Everyone always says how cool it would be for everything to be like Mass Effect or more, with all choices mattering and everything interacting, but someone has to write that. AI is not turning out well though out plot points that don't feel like the equivalent of Bethesda mission creep.
Point of this whole ramble being that in arcadey/simple stuff I think we'll see a lot more great games (and would argue we already were with the growth of the indie scene over the last 15 years thanks to steam and other tools), but there's still going to be entire genres that are just miserable to develop.
I agree. Game design is what makes a good game, not the programming. And I'm actually excited about game designers and artists being able to take their independent ideas and prototype games in a day/week/month/year/whatever.
+1 on fighting games, an interesting trend in that genre right now is that many of the latest titles (realistically everything other than SF6) are having trouble with player retention, while AI-assisted netcode updates for old titles like SF4 and Tekken 6 seem like more compelling products
Or, the lower barrier to entry crowds out the committed indie devs willing to invest years of their life honing their unique artistic vision for a game that might end up being a hit on Steam (among many other failures). The perceived odds of getting some recognition or even a moderately profitable hit go from "slim but possible" to "hopeless".
Because now their competition outnumbers them 1000 to 1, the competition isn't devs or artists but anyone with a phone, who can be from any part of the world who may not even speak the same language. Many to most of these solo "devs" aren't interested in games at all, and just hoping to rack up sales, ads, hype a crypto shitcoin launch or whatever. These slop games all have flashy attention grabbing visuals, slick product pages, five minute promo videos, with the games boasting 500+ hours of gameplay... of which 99% are recycled borderline unplayable trash.
The indie market for lemons stifles indie devs who struggle to find any audience, with modest dividends going to the most deceptive, scammiest solo sellers churning out 10+ titles per day (mostly 1:1 copycats of GTA/AAA games, psuedo-porn games, gambling games, meme/news cycle one-off games, etc). Middlemen like Steam print more money than ever as purchase volume increases while the indie gaming market becomes closer to the mobile games industry today.
The vast majority of the force multiplier value from AI is captured by the handful of AAA conglomerates who follow the tech monopoly strategy of maintaining market share by constant acquisitions and collectively control the most valuable IP while constantly reducing headcount thanks to models like Genie.
But who knows. It just seems like wishful thinking whenever I hear talk about how AI will empower the little guy to take on Goliaths considering the huge amounts of capital driving AI research and products are coming from those very same giants.
Their "good games" is different from our "good games".
To us, games like BG3 or E33 are masterpiece, but let take a look the most profitable games, GTA V, that is their "masterpiece". R* Knows this and high chance GTA 6 will continue this trend, a passable story combined with top notch graphic and physic, which both AI is really good at already
What makes a good game has changed over time. Pacman is, honestly, boring as shit now.
Mappy, weirdly enough, holds up well. Bubble Bobble, still good. Mortal Kombat 1, meh.
Some of my favorite classic games, almost unplayable now. Tastes have changed dramatically.
Movies are the same. Very few movies hold up after multiple decades. Some do. But even some great ones don't.
I don’t really agree for movies, basically my entire top 50 is pre-2010, many of my favorites much older.
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Why wait? It's become very clear already: https://kotaku.com/the-proliferation-of-copycats-on-steam-ma...
Instead of better it's become unimaginably worse since games can no longer serve as a means of self expression because the second you express anything worthwhile 100 people copy it immediately ... without you. It's like Disney (whose whole business model is copying public domain stories and music and ... but taking out the source and everyone who ever had anything to do with it). Except there's no longer one highly selective company destroying the world's culture one piece at a time, but 10000000 idiots looking to make a quick buck, destroying culture and self-expression like a fire raging in the rainforest.
There will be no more "celeste" games where you join for the platforming but stay for the (politically offensive to all sides) story, because AIs won't discuss the story as it's politically incorrect. Celeste is fundamentally about depression and anxiety, due to being transgender, and is about offending both sides of the argument. First, the main character is transgender, with zero explanation or need for explanation how far that goes, which of course offends conservatives. Second the goal of the main character is to run away from any provided help and professionals (which the director did too) and even under the most extreme of circumstances only reluctantly accept help from a family member that then promptly dies making things "worse".
The Qwen and other Chinese models (and ...) will refuse to discuss being transgender at all, and any western models will shut down any discussion of running away from help hard (because otherwise they get held responsible for the consequences, as has already happened)
(oh and that running away from professional help in psychological issue is actually observed to be a positive thing in almost all cases, in studies. The main way to make psychological problems worse is to let them fester and running away from help is time and time again observed to be far more productive than going to professionals and expecting them to fix things. Because that's an extreme human bias: it can never be (allowed to be) the right reaction to NOT do something about a problem, especially when countless people are paid to "solve" the problem. In other words: if you take people who expressed intent to commit suicide and compare the groups who "get help" and the group that successfully shut down help, less people actually go through with it in the second group, and worse than that, the more intense the help, the better the odds the patient ends up killing themselves. Right to the point that doctors sometimes assist such patients because after 2 years of attempts people live in constant misery and have caused enough medical damage that they will have constant pain or worse the rest of their life. And yet people keep forcing help on patients. Usually in response to an actual suicide where no help was provided. Then more help gets built, and 5 years later we yet again observe ... more suicides. But tell someone with an actual problem to avoid help and you'll be skinned alive for that)
So AI could never make a game like that. Not because it actually can't, or isn't capable, but because there already is a strong political bias, in every model you might use to make it and neither side is going to back down on their policies. The Chinese Communist Party is not suddenly going to change it's mind about transgenderism. And the western models are not suddenly going to openly discuss running away from psychological help, not even as part of a story.
So really, we've just lost these games.
I get that AI anxiety is running high. But, this is doomerism running hard.
Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the new Threes! https://www.theverge.com/22914955/threes-2048-ketchapp-copyc... A very simple game to clone that gets 10,000 headlines because creators have always been anxious about cheap clones. And, anxiety drives the clicks that pay the bills.
Meanwhile, local models are already extremely capable and slowly shrinking their gap vs. frontier models over time. And, it has been long established that the censorship trained into those models can be disabled easily with open-source tools. De-censored models will happily dig into topics that push beyond the limits of sanity, let alone political pearl-clutching.
Besides that. If you want to write about some topic and AI doesn't want to help you, you still have your fingers. Type like a human and you haven't lost anything compared to when Celeste was made.
100%
Needle in a haystack isn't a game. It's a way to stimulate your brain for 30 seconds at best. It's not a game.
Man I really liked Threes.
Hmm. Never heard of non-conservatives thinking Celeste was offensive. It seemed clear to me that a large part of her character arc was learning to accept help when it was offered.
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It will lead nowhere. Graphics intensive video games as interactive environments benefit from efficient rendering done by hardware a fraction of the cost of what a neural network requires for the same output. This is a business dead end.