Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of Smash Bros., believes that AI will lead to games without originality
, by Thibaut
Artificial intelligence is still viewed with skepticism by those in the video game industry. Among the skeptical on the subject is Masahiro Sakurai, the creator of the Super Smash Bros. franchise.
In an interview with Denfaminicogamer, the Japanese designer expressed concern about the effects of AI on the originality of games. To illustrate his point, he noted that 275 games were released on Steam each year in 2010. That number has now risen to over 19,000 per year. This absolutely insane increase isn’t exclusively due to artificial intelligence, but it does reflect a certain ease in designing games, something that AI is likely to intensify.
"Although 19,000 titles is a considerable number, I think this figure will only increase, as AI will be used to produce them. Most will be unplayable, and there will be so many that it will be impossible to catalog them, or even to understand them. With these AI-created games, the vast majority will be exact copies of existing games. There are already plenty of them, even now. A while back, a game called Librarian was released. It’s a game set in a magical world where all the books are jumbled up and you have to put them back in order.
That’s the basic premise, but the mechanics are simple. Unsurprisingly, numerous imitators quickly followed. Games like Supermarket Chaos or Needle in a Haystack Simulator have proliferated at a breakneck pace. They’re all puzzle games, but this kind of imitation will be easy for AI to produce. However, even if an AI can create all these works—for example, by analyzing the atmosphere of Fumito Ueda’s games like ICO and Shadow of the Colossus and drawing inspiration from them to create something similar—which is possible—it will never be able to recreate the works that Ueda himself will create in the future."
Thus, Sakurai believes that only human creativity can give rise to unique experiences imbued with a genuine atmosphere.
Source: news.denfaminicogamer.jp