Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Intriguing reader comment by veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert (BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, among many other titles), discussing the potential uses of ChatGPT and other generative AI for designing games: 

AI is really good at generating ideas but none will be better than 80% of the way there. That being said, that's not nothing! That could be a huge head start to work from and could result in a net gain of quality quests.

As an example, I asked Chat GPT to generate a whole bunch of names for swords from me.  [See above] 80% of the names from ChatGPT were crap, but a designer could probably get a pretty good list of names if they were willing to (a) curate the results and (b) take the time to further train the AI so that its next version is better.

Creating 10,000 sword names is a terrible, soul-crushing task that MMO designers hate and could take us two weeks.

I could definitely see AI being used to make a list of better names in only a day (where that day is basically multiple iterations of the task). Menial tasks like this being more automatable means that designers have more time to spend on stuff that matters more.

"Basically," Damion tells me later, referring to the list of swords ChatGPT gave him, "most of those are 'fine' for non-exceptional stuff (i.e. grey, white or green weapons in World of Warcraft). Which is good — creating the boring background items and NPCs is actually both incredibly boring and incredibly time-consuming."

I have done some writing for MMOs, and can personally confirm the tedium: The first hour, you start editing the item database with a childlike, "I can't believe I get to help create a whole new world!" zeal. By the fifth hour, you're grumbling to yourself, "Holy shit a robot could do this."

And now a robot can.

With a program like ChatGPT however, the human game designer can work at a higher level — the fun stuff, where someone with a really ambitious vision can imagine a whole alternate world — creating a large "bible" for the virtual world that includes historic lore and even special language (i.e. like a few hundred words in ancient Elvish or whatever), and then train ChatGPT to create weapon/character/etc. names from that knowledge base. 

Schubert concurs, with some practical advice:

"Oh, absolutely. Go do it yourself. Ask for a thousand [fantasy MMO] names.

"Whatever ChatGPT gives back, say 'No, I mean more like [this example]' or no, 'I mean more like [this game]'.

"Whatever it gives back, say 'OK, let's take this structure and make it feel more like Tolkien or Star Wars.'

"You can do that with ChatGPT right now, and that's before doing things like setting up your own AI agent, which you can actually train on your own lore. Which I think is what Ubisoft is exploring now.

"Despite all the hubbub, ChatGPT rarely gives you the right answer the first time you ask. The power is that you can refine rules and iterate very quickly."

This may be great advice for senior game designers like Damion, but I have to wonder if ChatGPT is demoralizing for new / incoming designers. For decades, entry level designers were the ones who'd do the tedious grunt work of coming up with 1000s of MMO item names. What happens now, when ChatGPT can do that roughly as well, quality-wise, but far more cost-effectively? 

Damion's advice for new game designers:

"Don't think of AI as a competitor. Think of it as a tool. Designers who can coax AI to produce quality content will have value.

"In the meantime, there will always be a curation issue (AI needs to be told what's not good enough), and the most important and unique content in the game will still likely need to be assembled by skilled designers."

And as Damion adds, we can't be sure exactly how AI will be used in creative contexts after IP lawsuits around AI training (recent example here) start playing out in court. It's all fun in games to tell ChatGPT, "name weapon items in the style of Star Wars" now, but maybe less so after Disney/Lucasfilm's army of lawyers come calling.

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