How Arc Raiders’ Innovative AI Started Dispute over the Future of the Gaming Industry | games

AThe RC Raiders are, by all accounts, a late-game contender. In a multiplayer world overrun by hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you saw on your way back to humanity’s underground safe haven, or will they shoot you and take everything you just collected? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity has (mostly) chosen to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.

In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’ ability to generate war stories, highlighting its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us choose instead to lend a helping hand is, if not a sign that humanity will be okay in the real world, at least makes it one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”

But, but, but, but… There is a small irony in the arc’s depiction of humanity united against the machines. The game uses text-to-speech voices generated by artificial intelligence, trained on real actors. (The game also uses machine learning to improve the behavior and animations of its robot enemies, a different kind of “artificial intelligence,” which video games have been using forever.) Game writer Rick Lane found this to be such a moral compromise that he couldn’t get past it. “For Arc Raiders to ride the wave of human sociability all the way to the bank, with such disdain for the very thing that makes us social animals – sculpting and reassembling human voices like a digital Victor Frankenstein – demonstrates a lack of artistic integrity that I find impossible to ignore,” he wrote for Eurogamer.

Generative AI in video game development has become a red flag issue for many gamers (although it’s impossible to know). how Many – neither social media anger nor Steam forum sentiment are reliable predictors of how most people actually feel). It gives a lot of people, including me, a disservice. Last week, the new Call of Duty game also came under fire (sorry) for using art that was supposedly AI-generated; People absolutely hate it. Proponents of using generative AI in games often say it enables small developers to do more with less, but Call of Duty is a multibillion-dollar franchise. Activision can pay artists more than just money to draw something. Given the success of Arc Raiders, you can say the same about AI voice lines.

It’s an existential issue for those working in video games — artists, writers, and voice actors in particular, but also programmers — who may be at risk of losing this technology. Many believe that gaming company overlords would be happy to replace expensive and inconvenient humans with machines that generate inadequate but functional work. Take EA, which requires its employees to use the company’s in-house AI toolkit, despite it apparently being widely disliked. Then there’s Crafton, which proudly announced that it was an AI-first game developer before offering its Korean employees to voluntarily lay off their jobs.

In fact, most of the people who rush to defend the use of generative AI in games are not casual gamers or developers on the ground, but rather the corporate class. Epic’s Tim Sweeney — who has a net worth of $5 billion — posted on Beforehand, what about endless, context-sensitive, character-reflective dialogue that relies on and is controlled by human voice actors?

Personally, I don’t want a machine to constantly generate things that it thinks I want to hear. I prefer to have characters speak lines written by humans with what they say, performed by other humans who understand the meaning. As award-winning video game actress Jane Perry put it in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz: “Would a robot go on stage at the Games Awards or the BAFTAs to accept the award for best performance? I think most audiences would prefer real human performance; but the creative drive of the tech elite is incredibly strong, especially when the name of the game is replacing humans with machines.”

During my many years covering this beat, I’ve noticed that what happens in the world of video games often happens in the wider world. A few years ago, there was a rush of investment in Web3/Blockchain-based games, which bought into the idea of ​​non-fungible tokens – digital “artworks” that people could own and trade, all of which were incredibly ugly, all rad skulls and computer-generated, cigar-smoking bastards; Fortunately, that bubble burst spectacularly. When the big tech world suddenly latched on to the idea of ​​“transformation” a few years ago, gaming companies had already been building much better versions of the idea for decades. Gamergate introduced a scheme to weaponize disaffected youth, which directly influenced the Trump campaign’s playbook and set a template for the now-ubiquitous culture wars. That’s why anyone interested in the impact of AI on business and culture should look at the ripples this technology is causing among developers and gamers. It could be an interesting indicator.

What we are witnessing looks like a familiar conflict between the people who actually make things, and those who profit from that work. We’re also seeing players wondering if they should pay the same money for games that include low-quality, machine-generated artwork and sounds. We are now seeing new lines being drawn about which uses of AI are culturally and ethically acceptable, and which are not.

What are you playing?

From the people behind the devastator that is coming before your eyes Good night universea game where you play as a super-intelligent six-month-old baby with psychic powers. Narrated by a child’s inner monologue: Little Isaac suspects that he is smarter than a child should be, and finds it extremely frustrating that he seems unable to communicate his thoughts and feelings to his family. But he soon develops telekinetic abilities and the ability to read minds, attracting unwanted attention. If you have a webcam, you can turn it on with your eyes, by looking around and blinking. This game packs an emotional punch and the plot also goes places I haven’t been anticipation. It also made me feel nostalgic for my relative past, when my kids were still kids.

Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox
Estimated playing time: Three to four hours

What are you reading?

• Nintendo has released the first image of the upcoming Legend of Zelda moviestarring Beau Bragason and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, pictured here lounging in the meadow. In it, Link appears in Ocarina of Time; I’m reassured that Princess Zelda is carrying a bow, which hopefully indicates that she’ll be part of the action rather than a damsel in distress.

• Nominations for December game Awards They came out led by Ghost of Yōtei, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Death Stranding 2. (The Guardian previously served as an outlet for awards voting, but is not this year.) As we reported last week, the annual event recently dropped a Future Class program for up-and-coming developers, who described feeling like props.

• A group of designers have brought to life Sony’s infamously canceled shooter Concord It came back to life – but the company brought down the ban hammer, issuing takedown notices of gameplay footage shared on YouTube. Its servers are still running – for now.

What to click on

Question block

reader quality This week’s question asks:

“I recently started playing No Man’s Sky. It’s the first game I’ve ever played and I feel like this is possible at some pointturned into something you lived in – like Ready Player One, or the now ubiquitous Japanese language isekai scenario [where characters are sucked into an alternate world]. Does anyone else have a game they Can you live in it?

I had this feeling when I first played Oblivion 20 years ago. Playing the remaster, I now find this idea laughable, but at the time I thought the game had everything I needed – towns, cities, food and delicious books. It has interesting people, lions, anthropomorphic lizards, magic, weapons and vampires. If I can do it, I will He was They lived in Cyrodiilfrom the Sheikh’s manuscripts (above). It seems small now, compared to modern open world games, but I think if I spent hours in a fantasy world instead of my actual life, I wouldn’t want a world that was so huge. I want one that can be overcome comfortably.

I can think of a lot of hypothetical places won’t Want to Live – World of Warcraft Azeroth It is very dangerous, and Mushroom Kingdom It’s so colorful it’ll hurt your brain, and don’t get me started on the Elden Ring The lands between. Hyrule Very lonely. With No Man’s Sky, it’s mostly the other players that make it interesting.

I’ll ask my readers this: Is there a video game world you’d like to live in?

If you have a question about the Question Pack – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us at pushbuttons@theguardian.com.