In the last year alone, generative AI has advanced significantly. Initially, ChatGPT astounded us with its text-based capabilities, and apps such as Midjourney and DALL-E discovered a way to generate graphics with basic instructions. Others are now able to create videos in the same manner, such as Sora from OpenAI.
Maybe that’s why the news that researchers at Google DeepMind have developed a software to produce 2D video games doesn’t surprise me. The computer, called Genie by the researchers, can really turn you into a playable platformer, but getting there does appear to take a bit more input than something like what Midjourney needs to turn you into a picture.
More than 200,000 hours of publicly accessible 2D platformer gameplay footage are used to train Genie. The bot learns the principles of 2D platforming design from this information, and it is even able to distinguish between playable elements and static backdrops and interfaces. To create a game, Genie may receive written descriptions, actual photographs, animated graphics, and sketches.
Check out some of the outcomes before you become very impressed. It looks like Nintendo’s eShop won’t be hosting these Genie-generated games anytime soon. They actually have a really bad appearance. They appear more like someone dreaming about playing a video game, in my opinion, because there isn’t much for the player to really do, the animation is fast and jerky, and the components are fuzzy. Furthermore, Genie isn’t really user-facing yet, unlike many early AI projects, so it’s hard to determine how refined the samples we’ve seen were or what the typical output is like.
That being said, this is the first time we’ve seen Genie. The output of the model will surely become better as it trains and gets better. When will Genie be able to produce a complete, playable game that you’ll want to play? I’m not sure. When will Sora be able to produce a whole video that is visually appealing? There are still unanswered concerns regarding them.
However, it is true that this technology grows more problematic the better it gets. I find it hard to believe AI-generated games would benefit workers given the number of layoffs that have already hit the gaming sector this year.
