Making a world internally consistent by explicit placement gets harder as you increase in scale. When internal consistency is a factor impacting quality, there is a scale at which generated content eventually becomes the higher quality solution.

Secondly, when generating content with AI, the same rules around carelessness apply. There are certainly generative AI tools out there that offer few options when it comes to composing what you want, that is not a necessary part of AI, some of it is because people are wanting rudimentary interfaces, some of it is that the generators are sufficiently new that the control mechanisms are limited because they are focused upon doing something at all before doing it highly controlled, in some ways the problem is that things are new enough that it can be hard to describe what is desirable controllability, making the generator to see what people would like it to be able to do is, I think, a reasonable path to follow prior to creating the control that people want. Part of it is also that there _are_ tools that give a high level of control over what is generated but far fewer people get to see them. There are ways to control styles, object placement, camera motions, scene compositions, etc. The more specialised you get, the smaller the subset of people who need that specific control.

I think AI can make things possible for people who could not have done so without them, but it's still going to take care to make something special.

Yes, exactly. Inundate the world with superficially plausible yet hollow content, including any desired themes. People who aren't very discerning won't complain; the others will be outmatched and find that 99/100 pieces are all noise and they will need to spend increasing amounts of time trying to find the 1, if they can.

I think there are some good parallels with Amazon: the broken sorting and manipulated unit pricing, coupled with the avalanche of cheap clones pushes users to give up and just buy one of the top listed products (a featured listing/Amazon-clone). If you do a web search for various products and go to images, Amazon product links often take up 50-90% of the results.

Put another way, the average game quality will go down, but the actual rate of "Great" games will go up.

That's a pretty specific and one-sided example. There are tons of good games that don't rely on elaborate item placement (e.g. many Bethesda games are great because most items are useless decorations, they broke that rule in recent games, giving the purpose to clutter, and it made them a lot worse). There are tons of good games not relying on this intentionality at all, they're either literally random cool ideas thrown at the wall, or even procedurally generated.

So, what's the deal?

As with ANY work in life, the quality of the result is a direct reflection of care and intention behind it. Simplified, it's a reflection of how much _you_ put effort in it. It always shows. Even in AI day and age. It's just that path to a result (without effort) is now way shorter so volume is showing up and diluting the overall impression. The latter kind of cheapens every field it touches, so even more effort will have to be put in to show up on the radar.

The other is creating multi-modal models with a better understanding of our world. LLMs often fail at incredibly basic spatial reasoning ("someone left a package in front of your apartment, describe going there", or the "should I drive to the car wash or go there", etc). World models excel at these kinds of things (in theory). They develop a great understanding of physical spaces, object interactions, etc. They can simulate fluids, rigid body physics etc. You "just" have to get really good at making world models, then somehow marry them with an LLM in a way that ensures the LLM can benefit from the world model's training data. Nobody has managed to really do that yet

So lots of hopes for the future. Until then they get commercialized as video models, or ways to experience your favorite forest, or to have a really bad video game ... whatever can be sold on a short time horizon to finance the actual goals

One aspect of intentionality is that there’ll be a narrative payoff when you find something you find interesting. In videogames, the world is mostly pre-designed, so the designer has to predict what you’ll be interested in for the most part (In pen and paper RPGs, this is usually done better, because the human dungeon master/DM can plan ahead, but also improvise a payoff or modify the plot between sessions). If there was a world model generated game world, I guess the model would have to be “smart” though to setup and execute those payoffs.

An advantage that the world model would have (and shares with a good human DM) is that everything is an interactable, and the players get to pick what they think is interesting. If everything is improv with a loose skeleton around it, you don’t have to predict as far out. I think world model generated games, if they even become a thing, will be quite a bit worse than conventionally designed ones for a long time (improv can be quite shallow!) but have a lot of potential if they work out.

FromSoft is an interesting example. They make the game more believable by having extremely missable quests, just, most of them don’t block progress through the game, and you usually stumble across enough side quests naturally (although IMO the density was too low in Elden Ring, their system showed a bit of weakness in the less-guided context). The plot is pretty vague, but the vibes tell enough of a story that you don’t really mind. It’s sort of improv/pen-and-paper but the player’s imagination is doing the job of the DM.

Many of the most popular games in the past decade are procedurally generated and have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms).

They can be very powerful tools but creating meaningful art/subjective work that is actually good is actually a borderline impossible task for LLMs since it requires genuine creativity.

Similarly, I am seeing coding agents be infinitely more useful to people who already code than non-technical people thinking they can vibe code their own Salesforce.

Its just that AI doesn't work well as a "productivity booster" tool in the marketing context. So they are pushing towards the idea that anyone can do anything with AI which is imo a really stupid hill to die on or base your ipo on.

It’s been my belief for several years that this is how the future of games will be constructed. Data in the background, game engine for rules application/ physics execution/orchestration/maybe low-poly rendering, an AI world model taking low resolution input in generating customized visuals/effects/textures/everything, even camera location, but still constrained by concrete rules in the game engine.

I’m certain one day it might all be handled by AI, but the above seems much more realistic and achievable that expecting AI to do all of these things, at one, correctly, every frame.

On that first point I think it's important to remember that the lineage of video games comes from board & card games and sports. There's always been an ability to inject more complexity and less-intentionality into those things. Sports in some ways are like a simplified and altered role-play of war battles, and more realistic war roleplaying does exist but it has less appeal.

As humans we like solving things and noticing patterns and the intentionality of games taps into that appeal.

On the latter point I do think these world models will eventually be used to meaningfully contribute to building games. I think people will have to find new ways to design that balances intentionality against the freeform nature of these simulations, but it may take a while to have the capability to do so.

These world models are key for robotic and coherence in video generation.

Give a world model images of a factory, the robot now can simulate tasks and do the best result.

Give a world model images/context etc. and it can generate a coherent world for video generation.

What this world model system might be able to do for us in regards of gaming or virtual reality: Either simulate 'old' environments like the house of your grandparents (gaussian splatting but interactive) or potential new ones like a house, kitchen, remodeling.

It can also be a very interesting easy to approach VR environment were you can start building your world with voice. That would be very intentional. After all world building is not necessarily connected to being able to generate 3d assets. Just because you need to go this route today, doesn't mean you have to do this tomorrow.

Where you look for an intentionally evoked experience authored by a game designer, I am looking for an unexplored world unfolding before me filled with emergent and unique phenomena that perhaps no one and not even the game designer has seen before.

for example, I am 100% certain that ANY model could write a better Dragon Age sequel than the rotting corpse of Bioware did, because only humans can despise their audience and their source material. an LLM would dutifully attempt to produce more of the thing rather than 're-imagine' the thing for 'the modern audience'.

LLMs had nothing to do with this

Yes, we haven't gone that far with creating consciousness yet, but there is gonna be a lot of money around neural computing devices for consumers in the coming decades, so that will speed up knowing what sense data you need for consciousness.

Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft?

Generative AI is just another method to go procedural generation. Not necessarily a better way. Or you could even argue that procedural generation is a form of generative AI... But either way, there are games where the lack of intentionality is central to the appeal.

You’re right - but that world is not the end of the story. The intentionality matters. Human creations matter because they connect us. I don’t know how long it will take, but people will build judgement as to what makes for good use of these tools to make meaningful things and expand our creative horizons in deeply human ways. Mind you, there will always be shallow slop. It’ll just take time for creators to learn how to use these tools to make something that isn’t slop.

Would you consider it possible that the way non-intentionally placed items break the game immersion for you is because they appear in such a way that you think you can interact with them in a certain way, but you can't?

Like if there's an extra door in the house you're trying to get into, but that door doesn't really open, then in your mind that breaks the integrity of the game's systems. If so, I think the LLM response is that there are no more doors that don't open and that the world can be generated as needed.

No computer can handle the complexity of even a small town. But it would be possible, at least in the future, to generate the part of the world you interact with, which would heighten the emersion.