Opinion: Google's latest AI innovation offers a putrid vision of game development
In today's edition, we have an opinion piece on Google's latest AI tools and game development, plus plenty of news featuring the likes of the Like a Dragon series, Square Enix, and more.
Another supposedly life-changing AI model, another exasperated plea from a weary video game journalist.
Game developers (and creatives cut from any cloth) do not aspire to create "plausible content." People (and I'm talking about the humans working on your favorite games, not their corporate employers) create to delight, inspire, entertain.
We create to connect with each other and unpack our shared human condition. To create anything is to send fragments of yourself into the eternal aether, hoping that someone, somewhere, will find meaning in the deliberate, unpredictable, collaborative mess that art so often becomes.
Google evidently doesn't understand how developers make games, either. There's intentionality behind every single decision, whether it's designing an open-world in service of pacing or mechanics–or baking your narrative into the very fabric of the environment. These are not elements you can simply conjure into being with a string of text or AI-generated image.
Square Enix is mothballing the multiplayer battler after less than a year.
The 1988 RPG remake released on current consoles and PC in mid-November, and became Square Enix's biggest single-player launch on Steam.
'Anyone can become a game programmer as long as they have learned the basics of programming,' said technical director Yukata Ito.