I know it will not be fun to talk about this, but we will have at some point to do it. As you probably know, there are more and more Artificial Intelligence that can do stuff for us. The most recent advances is ChatGPT that can chat like a human, write text and even create computer programs.
Now what does that implies to game design in general?
On a short term, that means we could generate art, story text, maps and many other assets without needed any additional labor to do it. That can actually be interesting for people like me who likes to work alone. So I could do my own art without skill. It's a disaster for people who make those assets. We could probably digitalize board games we designed too. So no need for programmers anymore.
On the long term, it's just a matter of time before we become the next target. There will be a day where an AI will be able to create games for us. So if I want to play a fantasy Puerto Rico like game with war in it, I could tell the AI to generate such a game, and I would be able to play it. So each player would end up playing his own unique generated game to his taste. So we, game designers, will become useless.
So the feeling I had years ago that everything has been done, or is on the edge of being done will eventually be true. Not only another human with more resource than you can create your idea, but and AI can also do it and generate all the possible sub-variant of the game you would like to play. So why bother design it.
I can push the reflection further, by stating that mankind has no reason to exist anymore. According to Maslow theory (which is subject to criticism), there is a series of step that must be accomplished, like eating and security, it order to get to the highest state which is productivity. But with the arrival of AI and Robots, there is no need to reach a state of productivity anymore, because everything will be produced for us.
Unfortunately, from a psychological point of view, productivity is essential for the human mind. It happened to me once, due to a sickness, I had to stay home and do only entertainment activities ( TV, games, etc.). After a few days, the desire of productivity kicks in, you cannot escape it. Not producing anything will lead you to boredom and depression.
Sure, AI are not this point yet, they can make errors and have some limitations, but it's just a matter of time. The only thing I can foresee, is that an AI could have an hard time having ideas. Instead, the AI tries all possible variations of something that exists. Also AI seems to reuse stuff that exist, be we humans do exactly the same thing, 80% of the stuff we make is borrowed from somewhere else.
So I guess, the only thing we have left is get a game idea and pouf, it's done.
What are your though?
Should we stop designing games, or change the way we design games?
