Please join me in this nostalgia-induced discussion on a particular characteristic of older games that I feel like is missing on modern titles… Though I do ultimately recognize it’s I who grew up and changed, not the games themselves.
Close your eyes and think about your favorite childhood games and what elements made them stick with you… Do you recall that magical feeling of some mystery, rumour or hidden secret… one that edges on being beliveable or not, real or not? I love that, and I miss that profoundly. Let me give you some examples:
Super Mario 64:
A magical game where you explore a castle full of extremely diverse stages hidden behind paintings. But accidentally, you bonk your head against a wall and… What? There’s a whole hidden stage there. As soon as you start the game, there’s a huge door with a keyhole… After a lot of trouble and your first Bowser fight, you get a key, you excitedly run to that door and… It doesn’t open! You didn’t know that, but there’s another door. You go towards there and you find a weird room, filled with ghosts, in this otherwise empty lonely castle… There’s an eternal star statue whose text you can’t quite read, and if you happen to stumble into the right ghost… A hidden level inside a miniature mansion. Everything about this game sounds like it could be true of false: you have a room with a mirror, probably the first you’ve ever seen on a videogame, it keeps drawing you in… But the paintings in that room lead nowhere, you feel there’s a stage there… But where?
Here’s a fun anecdote from my childhood: I’m brazilian, and I didn’t speak english. I had an uncle that could translate some text for me, but he didn’t understand videogames. So when I’ve read the next star was called “Pluck the piraña flowers” and my uncle translated that into “give the Piraña a flower” I spent WEEKS dying to that actual Piraña fish in the stage, trying everything I could to give him a god damn flower… When I finally realized how to actually get this star, I begged my mom to call my uncle, now in college, to tell him how to get it.
Club Penguin:
Sounds silly, but Club Penguin absolutely nailed this aspect of mixing real game elements with rumours children would spread in school. There were hidden items everywhere, events that would change the world in subtle ways, adventures that did require exploring the island slowly… And then your school mate tells you that if you are at the right place at the right time, during an actual event, you can get an autographed background from the story NPCs. They’re real penguins, and you can talk to them and get this rare item. I mean… This very same friend also told you that in Super Mario World falling into one specific hole pressing Up + Y would unlock a hidden laser powerup, so you don’t quite trust it, but they swear their cousin is got the autograph… And it sounds beliavable. So I would spend weeks searching and one day, one magical halloween, I actually was there to see the NPC and get the autograph - it was real, and all the crazy effort was worth it.
Minecraft:
Now once again being a brazilian kid, gaming is quite a challenge. My first contact with Minecraft was on my XP-era laptop with an Intel graphics accelerator that existed before the “HD Graphics” era. This means that Minecraft ran at 20 FPS normally, at the lowest draw distance, and if it started raining the FPS would drop to 5 and I would dig a hole and hide until it stopped. This lack of visibility, and my lack of english skills to understand the Minecraft wiki, made the entire game a HUGE mystery: what items can I create? What minerals even exist? What monsters could exist down below or far from home? Can Bedrock actually be broken somehow? Should I be afraid of the Nether? Herobrine… actually exists?
I know this wall of text might make little sense… But as an adult, I know English. I probably know most of a game’s mechanics before buying it. I can play with the Wiki right by my side. If I tell a friend I think there’s some crazy mystery hidden somewhere… They’ll Google it and tell me if it’s real or not.
I just miss that magical feeling of wondering what’s there…
This is one of the ways in which generative AI in games is going to be awesome as the tech matures.
I remember playing the Zork-like text dungeon AI using GPT-3 as the backbone.
It started with me as a wizard looking for a certain book.
When I found my way to a library, I could have it read the various titles of each book on each bookcase, and even flip open to a page, which in turn led to a completely different path of surprise and mystery.
Pairing procedural generation with generative AI within a properly bounded set of constraints and caching variations is going to lead to another level of immersion and discovery from anything we’ve seen yet.
It’s become nearly frustrating playing games now and seeing where they fall short of what it’s going to be by this time next ‘generation’ of games.
World density and that sense of discovery around each corner that’s not being spoon fed to you in advance via behaviorally targeted YouTube video previews or junk game articles summarizing Reddit posts is going to be a wonderful thing.
Games are going to be going through a whole new Renaissance as the industry adjusts and adapts to emerging tech.
The issue is more generation is leaned on the less powerful it becomes. To create those stores that you were reading in books it was fed lots of other fantasy and game information, as more of its used the less ‘new’ stuff it can make.
That’s really not the issue.
The breadth of the modern LLMs is wide enough there’s no need for further broad training.
There’s certainly room for fine tuning (likely coupled with a discriminator) around specific world lore, like feeding it all dialogue and book text from all the Elder Scrolls games if you wanted it to generate things fitting with that universe.
But there’s no limits on how ‘new’ its stuff can be as long as properly seeding its prompts.
You’ll generally see development moving towards manual development for core story and generative AI for the extended universe. Almost like a literary foveated rendering, filling in the peripheral world with generated content while the core story beats are manually directed.
Also, keep in mind that by the time AAA games release where their design is predicated on generative AI existing, we’ll be about 2-3 generations ahead of where we are today in generative AI products.