Wagner James Au / New World Notes

To go by social media froth, the rise of AI technology like Large Language Models is soon going to utterly Change Games Forever, leading to waves of roiling layoffs of game industry employees. Why pay game writers, one common argument goes, when we can just get ChatGPT to churn out reams of NPC game dialog?

Speaking with several actual writers of hit acclaimed games, however, I got a much more thoughtful perspective, bereft of doomsaying.

Leigh Alexander, an independent writer who contributed to the award-winning Reigns: Game of Thrones (2018) among many other titles, sees understanding tools like LLMs as crucial to her profession:

“Kinda feel like writers need a nuanced view of generative technology to keep up in the game industry right now,” as she puts it. “There's a big big big gulf between ‘working with generative systems to have an emergent relationship with my own writing’ and ‘having ChatGPT write the NPCs.

“The latter is an exploitive fad that I expect to soon collapse. The former isn't going anywhere and probably if you work in games you'll need to be more literate with it than [saying] ‘all AI is lazy’–  which is itself a lazy view. You still gotta hand-author everything in your own models, and consider applications of emergence deliberately and for a reason, because it often makes things harder.” 

She likens the “AI is lazy” charge to a photographer saying, “‘Photoshop is only for lazy photographers’.

"It misunderstands the purpose and breadth of the tool, and it actually makes you sound like you don't understand photography (which seems bad for your prospects if you are working as a photographer).”  

Above: Reigns: Game of Thrones, co-written by Leigh Alexander

By contrast, Leigh adds, “professional longevity for storytellers in the game industry means not just writing, but literacy with tools — tools are the backbone of narrative design to me.”

Charlene Putney did narrative design for the recent hit fantasy RPGs Baldur’s Gate 3 and was a writer on Divinity: Original Sin 2. She also co-developed LAIKA, a LLM tool for game writers  “to offer suggestions using their voice, characters and concepts.” So as you might guess, her view on AI is also nuanced:

"I think AI will bring big changes to every creative field over the next few years, but not in an apocalyptic way,” she tells me. That’s even more the case with the game industry, which unlike the other arts, is only a few decades old. By her lights, AI offers games a chance to differentiate itself from other medium even more:

Above: Baldur's Gate 3, featuring narrative design by Charlene Putney

“To my mind, this is another tool. I don’t see it replacing writers in the long run, I see it as a brand new spark of potential that we can use. And that beautiful little spark of potential in it that delights me is the same little spark that delighted me in the independent game development scene a decade ago: dream it up, make it, share it — now using the tenets of consensus reality as LEGO bricks. Not trying to recreate the media of the past: not novels, not movies, not songs. But some strange new creatures, new forms that are no more than shadows right now, coalescing into shape just out of the corners of our eyes.”

To that end, she’s creating other LLM-based tools for game developers, though notes that many of them are too busy — or perhaps too apprehensive — to experiment with them.

"With the strong productivity focus of the current games industry, it's hard for people to take time to play, to explore, and to bounce around with experimental things when there are hard deadlines and such a hostile general approach to working with AI,” as she puts it. “One needs a strong sense of self to weather the social media vitriol, and a strong sense of your own voice and what you want to say in order to experiment wildly."

As the lead writer of the classic Deus Ex franchise, set in a dystopian future amid the rise of sentient AI, Sheldon Pacotti actually contributed greatly to our popular apocalyptic conception of artificial intelligence, especially in Silicon Valley. (Elon Musk, among many other AI technophiles, is a fan of the game.)

“My usual experience writing science fiction is getting things wrong,” he acknowledges now. “Writing in 2000, I had a kid in the 2020s still buying CDs. Etc.”

“But one thing we might have gotten right in Deus Ex is people’s desire for AI in their lives. Morpheus, one of the Ais in the game, says that people crave being seen, and will take an omniscient AI in place of an omniscient god.” (Watch above.)

That’s illustrated even more in the game’s sequel, Invisible War, with an AI popstar character, NG Resonance. (Watch below).

“As an amateur futurist I’m gratified but also a little freaked out that in 2024 ‘companionship apps’ are a thing and in fact one of the fastest-growing applications of AI,” Pacotti puts it to me. “Whether as companions or “agents,” we’re likely to invite AI (and mass surveillance) deeper and deeper into our lives, and that should be great fodder for many dystopian plotlines to come, if not the key to the final triumph of the Illuminati in our time.”

As for potential use of LLMs in game development, Sheldon wrote me a mini-essay worth quoting in full:

(more…)