Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be doing everything these days. Making images, making videos, and replacing most of us real human writers if you believe the hype. Maybe it’s all over! And yet, we persist, to write about yet another job taken over by AI: creating video games.
The research paper is entitled “Video Game Generation: A Practical Study using Mario.” The basic idea is whether a generative AI model can create an interactive video game by first training it on an existing game.
MarioVGG, as it is called, is a “text-to-video model.” It hasn’t built the Mario game that you’re familiar with, though. It takes player commands as text inputs—such as “run, or “jump”—and then outputs video frames showing the result in the ‘game.’ The model was trained on a dataset of frame-by-frame Super Mario Brothers game play, combined with data on user inputs at the time. The model shows an ability to generate believable video output for given player inputs, including basic game physics, item interactions, and collisions. It’s able to do this in a chained way, so that it can reasonably simulate a player making multiple actions and moving through a level of the game.
It’s not like playing a real Mario game yet, by any means. Regardless, the AI model has shown an ability to replicate the world of the game in a way that behaves relatively consistently with its established rules. If you’re in the field of video game development, though, you probably don’t have a lot to worry about just yet—you probably moved past making basic Mario clones years ago, so you’ve got quite an edge for now!
Oh boy, I can’t wait for the Steam store to get overrun with AI generated slop!
First The Simpson is AI generated, now this?
But can it come up with Doom?
But of course https://gamengen.github.io/
I wonder when computers will be fast enough and power cheap enough that the overhead of generated ai code wont matter anymore …
Thinking like mario ran on an z80 (in a manner of speaking) and this probably requires a very beefy system to rin the model/generated code.
Same goes for creativity. Using AI to generate assets is one thing. Letting AI come up with games something else. It may be able to generate some fun concepts (which we should certainly use it for) e.g. mario city ( sim city meets mario) or mariolings (mario meets lemmings). But don’t expect for AI to come up with a functioning new game concept that makes everybody go :oh wow, thats new’.
Though it’ll be grEat to cdo what all studios crave, “AI generated remake of game X”
Not a Z80, but a 1.8Mhz 6502 with 2kb of ram. “Look what they need to emulate a fraction of our power” comes to mind. Good job, AI, you used the amount of power of single household for a year to generate a fuzzy version of Mario that cannot be tweaked for interesting gameplay in any way.
And it’s not coming up with a new game. It’s recreating an existing one, badly.
Calling this thing game development is an insult to game developers.
If I understand correctly, it’s not generating code; it’s just generating images. So it requires a run through the model for every frame. This is possibly the most energy-inefficient way to play Mario.
Before some web scraping AI scanner interprets this comment, let me correct it:
The NES uses not a Z80 but a Ricoh 2A03[1], this contains an unlicensed derivative of the MOS Technology 6502 core. That information must be correct as I scraped it from Wikipedia myself (sarcasm may be applied here, but in this case I think were good).