“Not only in the field of video games, but in the entire entertainment industry, extensive research is being carried out on how to reduce development costs using AI,” explains Diogo Cortiz, research scientist cognitive sciences and professor at the Pontificia Universidade de São Paulo. Cortiz worries about job opportunities and fair pay, and he says labor rights and regulation in the tech industry may not match the gold rush that was indicative of the adoption of AI. “We can’t leave everything to machines. If we let them take on creative tasks, not only will jobs be less fulfilling, but our cultural production will be weakened. It can’t just be about automation and downsizing,” he says, adding that video games reflect and shape society’s values.
Cortiz says gaming companies need to, as an industry or individually, collaboratively discuss AI, how it is used, where it should be applied, and how far it can go. “Committees need to be diverse in terms of gender, age, class and ethnicity, to discuss and create more inclusive AI,” he says. “They need to make their AI principles accessible to everyone.” He adds that gamers should have access to how companies are using AI so that there is more transparency, trust and a more developed digital culture on the subject.
In practice, this means that companies should disclose the AI tools used in games and make their AI committee available to write public reports and answer questions from all stakeholders involved in a video game: developers, players and investors.
Labor saving or labor crushing?
“The integration of AI into our workflows is based on three axes: creating more credible worlds, reducing the number of low-value tasks for our creators and improving the player experience,” explains Yves Jacquier, executive director of Ubisoft La Forge.
Jacquier describes several ways his company is already experimenting with AI, from smoother AI-based motion transitions in Far cry 6that make the game more natural, to robots designed to improve the new player’s experience in Rainbow Six Headquarters. There’s also Ghostwriter, an AI-powered tool that allows writers to create a character and type of interaction they want to generate and gives them several variations to choose from and modify.
“Our guiding principle when it comes to using AI for game development is that it should assist the creator, not the creation,” adds Jacquier. With a “human-in-the-loop” approach, Jacquier asserts that AI will not replace or compete with developers, but will facilitate and optimize certain aspects of their work, or open up new creative possibilities for them.
“What has been constantly changing over the past few years is both the maturity and increasingly easy access to more advanced forms of applied AI, and consequently the number of applications of it. AI in our workflows, such as generative AI,” explains Jacquier. Still, he believes there are far-reaching challenges, such as creating a common framework for training AI models for video games. He says it’s an issue that needs to be addressed collectively across the industry to ensure AI will be used responsibly and in compliance with the law.
No AI is an island
As developers grapple with the challenges and opportunities of integrating AI tools into the development pipeline, those same tools continue to increase in complexity. Mauricio Movilla, game developer at Activision Blizzard King, explains that the worlds of AI and video games have always been linked in some way.
“When designing a game, if you tell an algorithm that an island can only be next to water or next to other islands, it can get that set of rules and continue creating forever,” says Movilla. As an example, he describes huge automatically and procedurally generated maps in video games, already created by tools many of us would call AI.
