This Google AI can create a video game for you. The results are far from polished, but the promise is significant.
The generative AI has come a long way in a year. ChatGPT has impressed with its text abilities, and programs like Midjourney and DALL-E have created impressive images from simple text prompts. Others, like OpenAI’s Sora, can now generate videos in the same manner.
This Google AI Can Create a Video Game for You
It is perhaps not (very) surprising to learn that researchers at Google DeepMind have created software capable of generating 2D video games. Genie, as this application is named, can generate a playable platform game for you, but it will require more effort on your part compared to when you want Midjourney to generate an image, for example.
Genie is trained on over 200,000 hours of platform game gameplay videos, all publicly available content. This has taught the artificial intelligence the basics of designing a 2D platform game; the bot can even distinguish between playable elements and static background and interface components. Genie handles drawing, animations, real images, and text descriptions to generate a game.
Before you start dreaming, take a look at some games generated by this AI. These games created by Genie will not be appearing soon on the Nintendo eShop, for example. In truth, they look rather awful. They seem more like the result of someone dreaming of playing a video game: the elements are blurry, the movements fast and erratic, and there isn’t much for the player to do. Moreover, unlike many AI projects, Genie is not really usable by the general public at this stage. It is impossible, at this point, to know the average results achieved or how many different versions were needed to obtain the games presented.
Results Far from Polished, But the Promise is Great
Regardless, Genie is a significant first step. The model will continue to train and improve, and the results will keep getting better. Will Genie ever be able to generate a fully playable game that you really want to play? Difficult to say. Will Sora ever be able to generate a complete video worth watching? For now, these questions remain unanswered.
However, what is true is that as these technologies improve, there will be more to worry about: with significant layoffs already this year in the video game industry, one can only imagine the impact such AI would have on employees.