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Ok im gonna say something here that is going to draw a lot of different feelings from everyone, and I want to be clear i'm not "in support of this" or "against it". i'm just saying it as an observation that seems true to me: I think with the latest frontier LLMs, the “music” era of games is upon us

For years we have been talking about games going in the direction of music (in the sense that there’s more great music out there than anyone can possibly engage with). This trend has driven down prices, made it harder for developers to find audiences, and turned distribution platforms into soup.

But one thing that has always been true about games that was not true about music (or a lot of the other arts) is that games are just incredibly hard to make. As my friend Frank Lantz famously said, "games are operas made out of bridges". (sorry to drag you into this thread @flantz.bsky.social).

But that is clearly over. It is now fairly trivial to make any game of any complexity within the bounds of complexity that matter for most game ideas. You can build the bridge part in one prompt (and people are, all across the internet, to widely varying degrees of success and quality)

Obviously it still requires some real work to fit the bridge into the opera, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we ever thought that was the bit that kept everyone who wanted to make a game from actually doing it.

I don't think it is in any way hyperbole to say that these days, anyone with the level of drive needed to learn to write songs and play guitar, could put in the same amount of effort (or less!) and make a game of note. So here we are, games enters it's "music" era.

I don't really know what that means. It's probably not great for the businesses of most of the people I know (or me?), but I do think we've been creeping up on this for a while so it shouldn't be much of a shock.

When I think about lessons to learn from the music industry, i see that what matters most for stability and success are: attention and community-building. I don't really know more than that. Maybe someone else has some thoughts?

I know this has been a bummer, but if I am looking for a positive, even though this is bad for individual developers, I do suspect that this is good for games as a media. When I look at the arts, the parts of it that are the most in-culture are the ones that anyone can easily pick up as a hobby.

This change certainly supports a future filled with rough, personal, non-commercial, games of all sizes, built for friends and communities. All of which adds up to a deeper understanding of games and play. If a more mainstreamed cultural literacy of that stuff matters, that's a positive.

i've been thinking about this a lot too. I don't think one discipline is easier / harder than the other. They both require years of experience to make something "good" but I agree that games are now experiencing a level of fragmentation that's on-par with music.

I have experience with both music and games so I wonder a lot about the causes of that fragmentation and the way forward. Too hard to get into all that here but would be a great conversation to have (and keep having) in person.

I’m curious what games you’ve seen that have gotten you to think that line has been crossed.

hmm let me see. some i recall: www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/... www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/... www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/... then you also have stuff like 4x3 www.hankgreen.com/fourbythree/ also lots of pitches people email me for puzzmo, and then also from my own experience testing these models

mostly i think if you pay attention to whats going on in reddit.com/r/aigamedev it's a mix of cringe and surprising

These all seem like pretty poor evidence of your point.

You seem to be treating ai as simply a tool in a vacuum. Comparable to any other tool that helps make games. But that seems to miss a major part of it? I'd imagine a closer comparison would be to book publishing and visual arts, where ai hit earlier than games. Those are where I look for lessons.

I’m not sure I’m following can you explain further?

Authors don't look at ai books and say, hey, this is just more books I gotta compete with. The thinking around it is more complex... knowing readers aren't excited about it, knowing authors have had their work stolen, knowing some in the business end *are* excited about it.

out of curiosity, how do you apply/transpose that line of reasoning to music itself, where learning to play the guitar is (according to some) not necessary anymore to produce a guitar song?

yeah certainly not with suno around for example. i think it's more like, i was looking for an example of artistic effort that would be easy to understand for most people. but i think what you're asking is what does it mean that anyone can just click a button and output a work these days?

i really like this post about that - retrobailey.leaflet.pub/3mmsk37ojg22k but i guess where that author and i differ is my experience in creative work throughout my whole career is that the higher the level you operate at, the more depth that is available. and my hope is that holds true now too

I think you're largely correct, but I don't think it started with LLMs. It's never been easier to put together a game with the tools and resources that exist now. I think LLMs will make it easier for more naive developers to put together something coherent.

I think one important area where games deviate from music is addiction. I don't think getting addicted to music is common, but getting addicted to games is, and that may be the most widespread negative consequence of this new reality. The ability to build a hyper-tailored addiction.

i dont think this is true at all! i listen to the same song over and over and it gets stuck in my head and i think about it all the time. i think everyone gets addicted to music but the mechanics of what that addiction looks like and the impact of it are really different

Yeah, I thought about that distinction right after I posted it. The difference has something to do with required attention and likelihood of isolation.