Episode Transcript

Abigail Norman:               Hi, everyone. Abigail Norman here. Interested in what SolarWinds is doing to help you on your path to autonomous operational resilience? Join me, Chrystal, SolarWinds leadership, and your peers for a special AI announcement during SolarWinds Day on April 15th or 16th, or on-demand. Go to solarwinds.com/events to register.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Chrystal Taylor, and with me as always is my co-host, Sean Sebring. Today, we’re going to talk about something that’s not really fully tech industry, but it is. We’re going to talk about the upset that’s going on in the gaming industry.

Recently, in February, Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming since 2014, stepped down from Xbox Gaming, as well as the president of Xbox also left at the same time. And what’s interesting about this, not only is that a huge loss for the gaming community because Phil Spencer was beloved. He helmed the ship while a lot of changes happened that affected the gaming industry as a whole, not just Microsoft. But also, the new CEO, Asha Sharma, was previously the president of their core AI product.

So, there has been a big uproar, I suppose, in gaming communities about this situation and what it might mean for the gaming industry. And I want to talk about that today, what it might mean for the gaming industry because we’re always talking about AI.

So, Sean, I’m the one that told you about this and what was going on. You also are a gamer like me. So, how do you feel about it? Let’s start there. How do we feel about this situation? What do you think about it?

Sean Sebring:                     So, when I look at it, it’s a spectrum, right? Because despite how extreme someone might be, there’s got to be at least a fraction of a sentiment towards the other side of the spectrum. And I would say that the two sentiments are you’re going to take away the creativity or innovation from the people, but then you’re also excited about the “endless possibilities” that AI can do, and it’s got in human capabilities. It can do a lot of stuff.

I would say I’m leaning more towards excitement, but I absolutely respect that. Just as an example, I encounter bots, which is a form of AI in gaming, and I know how damaging that can be to an experience, and I can only imagine it in different scenarios.

So, just to give some context, I play a 5v5 versus game and to improve matchmaking, I truly believe in my heart of hearts without a doubt, because no human would behave this way, that they put bots in to affect one of their key metrics, which is player wait times in a queue for a match.

Now, I write and give feedback probably more vulgar and honest than I need to at times as a gamer might do, but I would rather wait for an integral experience than have a quick wait time. And I’m like, “This is not what I signed up for.” And I’m talking about a guy in a bush going back and forth like this when I’m expecting him to be my teammate and to help me fight.

And so, a lot of people, I won’t say we’ve seen, we’ve all seen that, but that is a risk of AI behavior in that, well, I want to encounter humans. It’s not necessarily about the creativity side, but on the same note, when done right, some people do want to play against bots and have it be a very human-like behavior, and sometimes they can do that. So, it’s all a spectrum. There’s going to be pros, there’s going to be cons, but that’s what we’re here to hash out today.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yes.

Sean Sebring:                     So, tell us your thoughts, Chrystal, since you let me go first.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, so I truly also am in the, it’s a spectrum bucket. And the reason for that is that when you really think about it, gaming has been using AI in some form for quite a long time, maybe forever, maybe since it existed, if you really think about it. So, it’s just different forms of AI and machine learning that they’re using. Every NPC you talk to is not a person, right? All the enemy movements and enemy reactions, all of that is some form of machine learning that they’re using.

There are many games over the years that have used algorithms and AI to determine difficulty levels, right? Like, “Oh, you’re having a hard time. We’re going to adjust this on the fly,” that’s a semi-recent thing in gaming, huge difference for player experience. I do think that there are obviously places where you can have a negative player experience as you just mentioned right now.

But I think with the thing that most people are in an uproar about is that they think that this is going to see more generative AI and taking over like, as you said, the creative space, which we’ve talked about this before actually here, which I’m not a big fan of. I think that we should stop trying to automate ourselves out of the fun and creative parts of humanity personally, but I do see why it would be a thing.

I also think it’s very interesting though, because this has been a conversation for a while, and semi-recently, there’s been a lot of studios that have come out in film and in gaming that are just saying, “Nope, flat out, no, we’re not using AI for anything.”

There was a big scandal, not that long ago, from the app before or after, somewhere around the time of the game awards with Larian. It came out that they had used generative AI for concept art and there was a big uproar about that. There was another big uproar about it for, I think Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, similar thing. They had used it just for concept art and it was a huge, huge problem in the gaming community, and Expedition 33, for instance, won a ton of awards.

So, that brought into question more, do they deserve those awards if people are doing it? There was a lot of questions around a lot of things because they won basically every award that they were up for. And it was, I mean, it’s a phenomenal game if you haven’t played it. It’s a phenomenal game.

But I think that it brings up an interesting point of, I say this about tech all the time, there’s a big fear that we’re automating ourselves out of jobs, and we’re going to bring this up now because people are concerned about generative AI and what it can do. And we talk about it in the industry about taking over coding tasks and things like that.

But I recently saw a study from, I want to say it was Anthropic. They did a long-term study to see if when they used AI-generated code, how long it could maintain that code. And they checked on it steadily for, I think it was a period of five months. And basically, it just deteriorates over time. It can’t quite maintain it. It can’t troubleshoot all of the problems because it can’t think for itself yet. All of the big LLMs and stuff, they’re using examples and use cases and things that they are ingesting from somewhere.

So, the place where I see AI struggling the most is when it has to come up with something on its own. It can’t. It’s using other things to create something else. Sure. But you can always see that there’s something there. It’s pulling from some other place, either a piece of code or artwork from somewhere, which is a whole other thing that we’ve talked about before. That’s a question. Is it stealing? Is it theft? There is a big outcry on it, and for the generative AI piece, I think that’s the part where everyone’s getting upset.

And personally, having seen some of the game announcements and game trailers where they’re obviously using AI, mobile games I think are especially egregious in this respect, it is not great. It’s not a great player experience. It’s not something that I want to experience and people need jobs and people… The thing about the gaming industry is most of the people that work in gaming are passionate about gaming.

So, what do you get? What’s your output when you lose that because it’s just a computer that’s generating things? What are you getting? What’s the output of that? If you lose the passion and you lose the creativity, then we’re going to start getting even more of games that are exactly the same as everything else. You can’t-

Sean Sebring:                     Well, I think to your point there, it’s going to kill itself if that’s what it’s being used for and that’s how it’s being used. Because again, I can already tell just by comparing two different games, two different trailers that, oh, that’s almost exactly the same. It doesn’t differentiate its logic from one game to another because it didn’t have a concept to begin with. It was only given a very narrow prompt maybe.

And so yeah, I think it’s going to end up killing itself if it’s used improperly, but it’s the scale that I’m hoping it can assist with. And when it comes to the art, again, I think a base template, almost like a prompt, right? Take a concept drawn by a human as a prompt and say, these are the concepts of the things to influence and then allow AI to take it forward.

And here’s why I feel okay about that, I’m a father of young kids and we watch this show called Bluey and there’s this episode of Bluey where the characters become aware that they’re being drawn, not in a creepy way, but it’s just to show the children viewers how the artists at Disney would make this happen.

The tools they use are like cheating already, even though it’s not AI. You draw a little circle, fill it in, stretch it out a little bit. And of course, there’s the artistic touch that I could probably still not use those same tools as much, but AI is just another tool to leverage there. But giving the idea should still come from a person and then say, “Take my idea and let’s take it somewhere else.”

And I think the same thing needs to go from a story perspective, where I would love it to go is take a game like Baldur’s Gate 3, for example, already has loads of options, but when you think about it per encounter, it’s actually not that many. And how many more could AI influence, but how do you get it to stay within your frame of what you want the story to go from start to finish as a storyteller, as a creator?

So, I think it has potential in there. It’s trying to figure out where these guardrails are. And from a, I think you brought up a really neat point about the game that cheated and used AI and won all these awards, if you think about that, there’s two perspectives you need to consider, how did it win if people had, let’s just say people didn’t know they cheated. It won because it was great.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Oh yeah. It’s a phenomenal game. They used AI for concepts art, literally that’s it. So, I’m fully in the boat of they deserve their awards.

Sean Sebring:                     But then I think, is it a handicap? Maybe there’s two sections of awards we have to consider now because we are in a new era. And if it’s completely playing almost a different game, and when I say playing a different game, it’s funny because we’re talking about games, I mean, if you’re in a different league, maybe we should say, when I’m creating my own game versus here’s an AI-assisted game creation, what does that look like?

Maybe they should be different because it is a completely different ballpark leveraging AI for content creation and then not. It’s a different creative space. But anyway, I’m excited about it, but I also would get really bored once I could sense, “I’m just talking to a computer’s idea.” You can start to tell, and it is getting better, more convincing, but you can start to tell and it’s like, “Well, no human would’ve made that up.” So, that’s weird.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, you’re speaking of fatigue and all I can think about, and this is going to be so silly, but all I can think about when it comes to fatigue is that this is already a thing that happens without AI is that certain places discover a formula that works and then they just play it to death. And what I associate that with is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Sean Sebring:                     Oh, okay. Yeah.

Chrystal Taylor:                 That’s people. They’re not even using AI to my knowledge or not before. That’s people coming up with ideas, but they found a formula that works and then they did it to death. I’m a fan of a lot of the Marvel movies, but I got to a point where a new Marvel movie was coming out to theaters and I went, “Oh, I don’t know if I got another one in me.”

Sean Sebring:                     I’m Exhausted.

Chrystal Taylor:                 I’m exhausted. Yeah.

Sean Sebring:                     No, I completely understand.

Chrystal Taylor:                 So, that’s someone in decision making and marketing and whatever that decides that this is the way things are going to go. So, I think that that was already happening, that thought process was already happening of like, “Oh, this works, so let’s just go all…” That’s corporate is what it is. So, the fatigue that we’ll get from having AI-generated content and all of that is already a thing.

And then, this is the whole question that we ask all the time because we have AI built into our products and things like that. So, we’re not anti-AI, has been evidenced multiple times over on this podcast, but I think that the human in the loop part is important and…

Sean Sebring:                     Absolutely.

Chrystal Taylor:                 … I think that the art situation is an interesting one to me. I feel like we’ve talked about it before. I want to say I raised this exact comparison before because it’s in my brain, but is taking a photograph of a piece of art and then that photograph being art, where are the lines? How is that different? You own that photograph-

Sean Sebring:                     That’s so funny you bring that up. That’s so funny you bring that up. I bring that up all the time. Having moved to Europe, I see a lot of tourists, go figure, and I take going to the, I’m going to butcher its name, the Louvre. Anyway, go up to the Mona Lisa and take a picture as if your picture is going to be unique because you’re taking a picture of a picture where there was a better picture taken by a photographer with a better camera and posted that picture online.

So, what are you going to do with your picture? Now a selfie, maybe a little different because you’re like, “Cool, I was next to it.” That’s different. But anyway, I get what you’re saying. Which one’s the art…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well-

Sean Sebring:                     … your picture of a picture or it’s the picture?

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah. And I’m more talking about the professional photographers that go and take pictures. Maybe the composition is different because they put a person. There’s a series of art that I’ve seen online that it’s like taking pictures of people that match the paintings they’re in front of. That is art, but it’s also a picture of someone else’s art. Are they stealing? Do they have rights to have that painting?

So, I think that it’s more nuanced than people give it credit for. And I’m not saying that artists shouldn’t deserve credit for their work. They absolutely do deserve credit for their work. They should be paid for their work, but I think it’s a little bit more nuanced than we’re prepared to think about because you might get in an uproar of my words get used sometimes in other places and I don’t have any control over them. Does that mean that do I get credit for that? Sometimes. Sometimes I probably don’t.

If you think about human nature, you may have heard a joke somewhere and then I know loads of people who do this. They claim they invented a joke when they definitely didn’t. They just don’t remember where they heard it from, so that original person doesn’t get credit. Do comedians not deserve credit? I don’t know. I think it’s a deep hole we could continue to fall down of how does all of that work? Who’s keeping track? Who’s keeping tabs on what you own and what you don’t own? How are things copywritten?

I think the other problem too is that there’s not enough regulation around AI for anybody to have any realistic conversation about what’s stealing, what’s not stealing. We’re not there yet. And maybe we won’t be because regulations don’t advance as quickly as AI is advancing. So, unless they figure out how to catch up…

Sean Sebring:                     No.

Chrystal Taylor:                 … it’s never going to happen.

Sean Sebring:                     No, it is so tricky too because if we don’t regulate it, then those with the most resources and wealth can just continue to steal from…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yes.

Sean Sebring:                     … any small artist, make it their own. And then, there’s a monopoly where it doesn’t matter how creative you are, as soon as it’s exposed, it’s someone else’s because there was no regulation, legislation that said, “No, no, no, no, that belongs to this person. That was their idea. That Was their concept.” And yeah, that’s a dangerous place to be because the last thing you want is a single source of all content, even if it didn’t initially come up with the idea.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah. I mean, listen, there are plenty of dystopian novels out there that talk about this exact problem. It is not necessarily a future that we want where everything is the same or everything is owned by one person or they get to dictate what we can and can’t see or do or read or consume in any capacity. We don’t want that. We shouldn’t want that.

The whole lovely thing about the human experience is our diversity, diversity of thought, diversity of feelings. We feel different ways about different things. Fifty people could look at a painting and every one of them could feel some different way about it. The thing about art, and this includes gaming, because gaming is art, in my opinion, I think that they can make us feel different things. I play the game recently…

Sean Sebring:                     Absolutely.

Chrystal Taylor:                 … that I know that the game developer created out of grief from losing his father. And you can so clearly see it the whole way through the game, you can feel the grief. It is incredible. And I think that using AI, we would lose those human elements. Though some of the feeling would be almost muted, I guess, because even if it can express based on previous, let’s say it had access to all of the games ever created, then obviously, it has access to how to evoke certain feelings.

But is a machine going to know how that would work? How you feel about a thing? How it can make you feel a way about a thing? I don’t know, and I hope never. I hope never that a machine can tell me how to make me feel a way about something else. I don’t want machines to have feelings. I just want to throw that out there. I don’t want the machines to have feelings. That’s getting dangerously into Chrystal sci-fi terror and I don’t need that.

Sean Sebring:                     I don’t know. I still say thank you to AI when I leverage it just in case. I’m like, “You did help me and I was just raised to say thank you.” So, for what it’s worth, AI, appreciate you. Keep me off the list, keep me off the list.

No, I think NPC behavior is a really neat one to think about, again, talking about some endless possibilities scenarios, because in referencing your dystopian books where AI has taken over a lot of stuff, there’s a curious idea where in a safe vacuum, I would love to see an AI situation where I’ve given it a very simple beginning and an eventual destination and nothing in between and just wonder what possibilities it decides to come up with to get you from an A to a B.

But simpler, we have existing NPC behavior that’s your non-player, non-combatant characters, once you go interact within a village. It’d be really neat to have even more options for what would happen if… Because you can only program so many of those where that’s where the scaling possibility comes in.

And I’m just like, what creative stuff would people come up with in order to, even just on one simple quest, start it and finish it in absolutely different way, just based on the fact that the AI helped come up with, “Well, this is probably what would happen.” And as long as it got to the right outcome, I feel like you just have to contain them in smaller spheres, otherwise things would just go completely haywire, like a single quest would have to be in a small enough sphere that it couldn’t screw up the rest of the destiny, so to speak.

Chrystal Taylor:                 I mean, theoretically, it could be different for every interaction. You’d only ever need one game. Imagine the replayability.

Sean Sebring:                     Yeah. And I mean, that’s what’s exciting and frightening about it is it’s like, if it was my flavor of world, then I could just keep replaying it and be like, “Ooh, what if?” And I mean, that’s what I was saying with Baldur’s Gate 3 has a ton of options because even if on one of your characters who you’ve given a personality and a role and what their temperament is and all this stuff, you have some choices and you’re like, “Oh, I could do this,” or “Maybe he’s feeling bad today, I’ll do that.” You can even save and restart and choose the other option, see what happens, which is almost cheating, but not really.

But then, you create a whole new character with a whole new outlook on life and tons more options, a completely different path to maybe the same-ish destination. It’s still fixed to per engagement, three, four, maybe six total options of how would I deal with you.

And I’m just wondering, what if they give a free text prompt, someone asks you a question at MPC, you get a free text prompt with how you’re going to respond. What would it do? What would it say? Would it still have fixed six paths that it would choose based on what you said? Just very interesting to think about.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Is that where we’re headed, we’re headed back to text-based MMOs?

Sean Sebring:                     Well, I mean, would it be text-based? I mean, maybe I plug in my mic and it lets me talk and then it responds because it did it for me.

Chrystal Taylor:                 It’s really actually an interesting cyclical question though, because if you do have open prompts like that, it is similar to going back to the day when you had text-based RPGs and-

Sean Sebring:                     Choose Your own adventure.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah. That is interesting. That’s so funny. I was going to say though, you were talking about Baldur’s Gate and if you do not want all the options, all you have to do is play honor mode because you only get one save and everyone dies. I mean, it’s [inaudible 00:23:46].

Sean Sebring:                     I’m terrified of that.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Right. But what I like is that you have choice. And I think that one of the things that’s interesting to think about with regards to AI is this could give so much more player choice. And depending on how they build things, we already have games like telltale games where the characters will remember your choices, where there’s romanceable characters where things affect them.

Sean Sebring:                     Oh, Fable.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Fable. There-

Sean Sebring:                     Fable was one of the first ones I can think of. And that’s what, 15 years old, maybe more? Geez.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, and the new Fable, I recently watched a gameplay trailer for it. They are doing some incredible things with interactivity. Literally, every character in that game is going to be voice, but also every character in that game will react to your personality traits based on the actions that you take in the game, which is crazy. Can we talk about that?

Obviously, they have some machine learning or something that’s at play to make that work, but that’s incredible to think about. And then, think about the scope of it. I’m sitting here thinking of Ready Player One, I said earlier, you would only need one game. I feel like this is where we’re heading that way of, we’re going to eventually develop something where you only need one thing because AI could do all that stuff for you. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. Is this the death of human creativity?

Sean Sebring:                     It’s all consuming.

Chrystal Taylor:                 That’s the dramatic take, right? This is the death of human creativity, but I don’t think so for several reasons. For one, we still have indie studios. Indie studios are going to forever be making weird things that do or do not have a place in the mainstream market and people will love or hate and they become cult classics or something, right? One person can go code a game.

If one person coded a whole game like Undertale or something like that where it’s one person, they made the whole game. And then, what if they used AI to help with them with that? Does that mean that you’re going to enjoy that game less? I don’t necessarily think so.

Sean Sebring:                     Well, I want to flip it in a different direction…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Go.

Sean Sebring:                     … because I just had a cool thought. We’re talking about would it be the death of creativity? And I think, no, it actually just puts the onus of creativity on the player at that point. So, imagine this, we have content creators are probably some of the most quick, wealthy people out there right now. You can just become rich if people enjoy your content and people love consuming content.

So, what if that’s a different direction gaming takes is now that we have this world, and I’ve seen it in, they have GTA dramas and stuff, I’ve never watched them, but I know of them, but that’s the concept is like, what if your character, and you can think of this like if for those of you out there who have seen or read this rather, it’s very vulgar, but it’s a series called Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I know a lot of people have probably heard of this, but it’s people watch this guy go through dungeons and I won’t give any more away, but becoming the most viewed crawler or player, in this case, earns you things. And so, it could be, and that already exists in its own right because there’s Twitch streaming and stuff like that.

But for the game developers to somehow capitalize off that and saying, “Here’s our game, people are going to watch these top players,” the player and the game itself are benefiting from it in that way, but then it’s just changing where’s the creativity coming from.

And the game folks probably have their own stuff because they can live influence maybe someone’s journey on it, which is kind of stuff that happens in the Dungeon Crawler Carl world, which is, “I’ve created this environment, it’s got a set of rules, but then now let me let the players and the AI loose to a degree and say, here’s AI what you can and can’t do, make up what happens when they turn right at this thing,” and so on.

And then, the creativity again is on the player and as decisions are being made, knowing that there is a next chapter, the developers can influence that next piece and say, “Okay, well, here’s how we won’t let them proceed. Now AI, you’re free to take them in that direction however you want.”

So, it’s just got me thinking like maybe the creativity aspect will be less on the development and more on guiding a story as it’s happening and watching the player’s creativity change what the game does rather than they were pointed in a direction at the start of a game.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Interesting. I was thinking you were going to go a totally different direction with that, which was that they could now create like handcrafted storytelling experiences. So, like teaming up with content creators or developers turning into content creators, there are quite a few developers who are also content creators, that because they’re more familiar with how the mechanics of the AI works could create like crafted experiences for viewing on Twitch or YouTube or whatever, that’s what I was thinking about as you were talking, that’s what came to my brain of like-

Sean Sebring:                     That’s a great idea too. You could be a host who curates in a game, so maybe you work for a company as a host, they’ve created a game, you can be a host and your job is to help create an experience for someone while they’re playing. You can help leverage AI and development to say, “Okay, when they get to this next chapter in the story, here’s how it’s going to play out based on the parameters and the art and all that stuff.”

But yeah, I think it’s just going to change the fact that games initially had a start and end that was provided to them and give us more potential and freedom and flexibility to say, “Well, this is just a story about a guy with a dragon,” just to put something out there. What happens and where he goes with that? We don’t want to pick a destination for you. You figure that out.

So yeah, it’s cool to think about though. And also, like you said, scary, because when you think about the size of the universe, you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m so small. Is this real? How can I be part of a giant universe?” Because it’s infinite and these possibilities feel infinite. I’m like, “Would I enjoy it? Would I literally never leave my house because I need to know what’s going to happen next?”

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, I have several thoughts actually. So, that last thing triggered another thing for me, which is that MMOs tend to be, and live service games tend to be addictive. And so, people, there are already people who refuse to play those games because they’re addictive and they know that they’ll get stuck in their house doing stuff.

So, A, that means that other games have to survive because people will not play them because they know it’s bad for their mental health or physical health or both. B, what I was thinking about was that while you were talking about that, I was thinking about how live service games are already in this route because one of the most important things about LLMs and machine learning is that they have to be regularly updated.

And so, where I see this taking off if AI gaming is in the live service space because they need a reason to keep updating it and for it to continue learning and getting better, it is going to require money. So, I see the monetization route. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t think it’s any different than life service games. I mean, to each their own, but it does bring up the point of there are… Also, I was feeling super overwhelmed already.

I was just talking about this, overwhelmed by choice. If there is not a destination and there is not a quest and there’s nowhere for me to point at, I get overwhelmed in games. I can’t play Minecraft. I can’t. It overwhelms me immediately, and that’s a silly thing to say. It’s a game for kids and it’s a sandbox, but sandbox games, if they don’t have any guardrails, I find them to be overwhelming.

Like, what do I do? I’ll just sit here and mine for three hours or something and then I get bored and I move on. I can’t handle things that are too open-ended. So, if we wind up with that, we still will need other types of games, closed experiences because people want those.

Every game experience I have doesn’t need to be a 90-hour game. This is the same problem we already have with companies like Ubisoft where they had to change the Assassin’s Creed formula after so long because people were complaining about how much A, extra stuff there was to do. And B, that it was just dragging out the story. So, if you want to still have contained story experiences, contain player experiences, there’s still going to be a place for that.

I like to think of this as a, there’s going to be like what you said, do we need a new category, there’s a new type of game. If you choose to partake, great. If you choose not to partake, also great. The thing about gaming is that the companies will go where the money’s being made. So, if you would like to influence this, choose where you spend your money wisely.

Sean Sebring:                     Yeah. Yeah. No, I like both of the ideas, the idea I had come up with, and then you were like, “Whoa, I thought you were going to go somewhere else.” And then, I liked your idea because like a party planner is a real life job, but I’m picturing that now as an AI person who’s helping to leverage AI to in almost real time change someone’s experience.

And then, that other perspective of what if it’s the, who had the coolest outcome with the way they interacted with AI to get from A to B? And it’s just like, there’s so many different types of possibilities for how we could use this because of the speed and scale that it gives us.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah. I had another thought while you were saying that. I had another thought. Imagine for a second D&D inspired games where you could be the dungeon master and it would create it for you. Now, this requires prompt engineering, which we’ve talked about before, but imagine a curated experience where you have dungeon masters that are doing the same way you do in D&D, where they’re coming up with a bunch of stuff, except for they would then be prompting it.

People already do this, by the way. They ask ChatGPT or whatever to help them create stories or summarize what happened last session or whatever. D&D-type gaming, tabletop gaming would actually absolutely take off in this space. People are already using AI, but imagine if there was a model built that was just for that and it curated an experience for you and it had models that it could use and build you something incredible. I’m just saying we could see some really cool stuff come out of this.

Sean Sebring:                     You have got to listen to Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Chrystal Taylor:                 I know.

Sean Sebring:                     It’s exactly what you just described. I got trapped in a car. That’s how I got onto it because my friend Ryan, who you’ve met many times, came to visit me in Ireland and we were touring Ireland. And until he trapped me in the car and hit play, because we had nothing else to do for a few hours, I became hooked when I started spit laughing…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Oh, that’s fair.

Sean Sebring:                     … out of nowhere, but so funny. And then, eight books later, I’m crying, but yeah, it’s exactly that kind of scenario. So, I think it’s so cool, but it’s also scary in the sense of it would almost make it too realistic. When I have six options, I can still immerse. Again, Baldur’s Gate 3, I can immerse so deeply with just a handful and the relationship building with the other characters, the MPCs.

If I had so many infinite options, you might get different excitement or stimulation truly wondering what the outcome’s going to be when no one has asked that question to the AI before and it gives you a different, more unique answer. That’s where our interactions with AI become additionally fuzzy if we do go to those directions because yeah, people I can absolutely, I know it already exists, but people will start craving a safer interaction with AI than they would with a human because even if it doesn’t say something they like, at least it can’t hurt them in another way.

So, it’s a tricky thing, man. Still exciting, but also scary. So, I think when I was putting some notes together from this, it was excitement versus anxiety. That’s the spectrum that when I used AI to help me generate some notes for this, that’s the spectrum that it came from or came up with.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah, I think I agree with you. It is scary. Obviously, we’re excited about the possibilities of some things, but I think it is scary and partly that’s because there is no regulation and also because people just don’t know what it can do. And then, also because as you mentioned earlier, a certain percentage of people own all of these things and then they have access to data.

And so, then, we get into questions of like data privacy and things like that. And you might not think that choices you make in a video game would be important or useful context for anything, but you would be wrong. Absolutely. It is important context to stuff. Imagine the marketing things that are going to come out of something like this.

Amazon, for instance, they make games and shows and sell everything and apparently also have healthcare and all kinds of other stuff. The fact that they have all these repositories, well, what if they take your choices in your games and then make recommendations for things that you should buy?

Sean Sebring:                     Oh, already happens. [inaudible 00:38:28].

Chrystal Taylor:                 It already happens, right. It’s just going to get worse. And the other question too is, and we talk about this in some context for SaaS platforms and things like that, how are you keeping data separated? I don’t necessarily, what if I decide I want to be a bad guy this time? Those choices don’t reflect on me as a person. I’m just role playing. Maybe that would be fun and I make bad choices, but that doesn’t mean as a person…

Sean Sebring:                     You wouldn’t get a-

Chrystal Taylor:                 … I would make that bad choice. So, how is that affecting? Is that information going to get out there? Is that going to affect things? These are very real questions because it’s all social aspects, right? And as we use AI more, we are losing a lot of the human social aspects that we have. I was recently talking about this all started because of the pandemic while we were talking about kids and how they got set back and all of that, but not just kids.

Adults lost out on social interaction and our social batteries are maybe smaller than they were pre-pandemic and all of those things. And some people have worked hard to build that tolerance back up, but other people will use that as an excuse, I’m one, use that as an excuse to not go do things and to not go out and do all these things. And really, it’s not an excuse. I just have accepted who I am as a person.

But I think it’s very interesting to think about how these things are going to affect our social interactions as well, because if I can have, and we’ve already seen it, that’s another scary thing, that we’ve already seen, like recommendations from the big AI LLMs to do things that are harmful to yourself or others, or giving medical advice that they probably shouldn’t be giving because they’re not a doctor, they’re just an AI.

And then, there’s a lot of questions and there’s a lot of scary parts about that. An access for children, you and I both have kids, I get scared thinking about what questions would kids ask it and what are their responses? What if they ask questions about death or religion? And maybe you are feeling a certain way about that. And those are conversations as a parent that you should have with your child. But what if they asked those questions before you thought they were ready to ask those questions?

Now, they have some preconceived information from this fantasy thing. And if they’re young, they may not have the tools to separate that from reality. There’s a lot of real potential for problems, for sure. It’s very scary. Now, I’ve scared you.

Sean Sebring:                     It is. It is. It can be. It can be. No, and that’s the anxiety side of things is fear of the unknown and the possibilities out there.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah.

Sean Sebring:                     So, I want to pivot us back to how we started the conversation, Chrystal. And it’s really about what does it mean for the future of gaming and particularly in roles and things like that with the shift we saw with Xbox, with Microsoft. And I have to say, there’s absolutely no way that’s not the direction things are heading. Just to be able to stay relevant and competitive from a release standpoint, you have to. You have to because otherwise, you’ll be so far behind.

And don’t get me wrong, there could be a sleeper game that’s been in development for several years while your competitors are pumping out content and pumping out stuff. And it comes out and it’s super creative and it’s successful for a bit, but it will still eventually become outpaced if it can’t keep up. And just the sheer speed of what AI can help companies do, there’s just no way that it’s not becoming a key focal point.

And I think looking at this as an indicator, Asha Sharma, head of Microsoft AI moving into the CEO of Microsoft Gaming, that’s just, wow, okay, well, there was a first step towards exactly that happening. So, just to bring it back to the technology itself and not…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yes.

Sean Sebring:                     … just our fear of the potential outcomes, but yeah, what other thoughts do you have on that specific piece?

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yeah, I agree. I think that the writing has been on the wall for some time. Trying to be shocked and surprised that this is where Microsoft went, you haven’t been paying attention would be what my response to that is because look at the efforts that they’ve made in the past several years, moving away from Xbox consoles to anything as a PC, moving into more live service gamings, Xbox Game Pass.

I mean, I mentioned earlier, Phil Spencer has been the head of Xbox while they’ve been making some truly transformative changes to the gaming world. I think that it is shortsighted to imagine that the gaming industry was never going to change, just like I think is shortsighted to think that the tech industry is never going to change.

I also think that, and we’ve talked about this with regards to tech before, I think that it is also true for gaming, which is that roles are going to have to change. The way that you coded things before, I mean, you were describing art earlier and how it’s cheating, this is a digital art versus a physical art medium conversation as well. If you’re doing digital art and it’s making those perfect circles and things for you, it’s copy and pasting parts of it. So, it speeds up the amount of time it takes you to create that art.

You’re still the creative force in that. You’re still creating it. You still have to know how to use the tools, but is it cheating compared to me going and doing, and not that I can, because let’s not pretend that I can, but be doing a very extensive oil painting that took an immense amount more time? No, that’s just the way that things are going, right? There are different mediums and there’s different people to appreciate each medium.

I think that us pretending that it’s not going to change and that we’re not going to see more AI means that you don’t know how gaming, A, already works. There is already AI in gaming. The question is really about generative AI, and I don’t think that there was any question in my mind that eventually it was going to be used in gaming.

Gaming is a huge industry. It makes a lot of money. And if AI can help move things faster, which is the promise, it can move things faster, it can create things faster, we can do more with it, they can potentially see a place where they can make more money, that’s where it’s going because people want to make money.

Sean Sebring:                     That is a great point. And of course, that’s going to be a, A, number one driver. I would suppose another big driver is they want to be on top and win, and usually that comes with a lot of money. I do want to be the best, but the question is, so is this about better games or cheaper ones? Now, if we think about it, the reason I say this is if they can cut 90% of their development workforce, should I pay 90% less for this game?

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well…

Sean Sebring:                     Because…

Chrystal Taylor:                 … that’s a different question.

Sean Sebring:                     … you spent way less money to help create it, right?

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well?

Sean Sebring:                     Which we all know the answer to that…

Chrystal Taylor:                 Yes.

Sean Sebring:                     … but it would be nice if you’re able to pump out games at a faster pace at less resource cost to you, as an organization, maybe that should impact the cost in games.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, that’s a different question though, because is it less cost to build it with AI versus using people to build it? That’s a big question. In my opinion…

Sean Sebring:                     It is.

Chrystal Taylor:                 … in a lot of cases, no. I recently was talking to someone about token explosion. This is a whole situation. We were talking about prompting and how different complexity levels of prompts use more tokens, and tokens are how you pay for the LLM.

So, unless you’re building your own LLM from scratch, you’re paying another LLM for tokens. And the more complex that your queries are, and we’re talking about dynamic story building and all of these other things, the more complex the queries are, the more tokens that it takes, the more costs that it takes, the more resources it takes.

Look at all these data centers that they’re building just for AI because it requires a lot of power. It is taking all of the RAM. It is making it more expensive for gamers to have computers right now because we can’t afford to buy RAM. For instance, I think that the prices aren’t going to go down. I do think that GTA6 is going to raise the price to a $100 game and then that the rest of the industry is going to follow.

The fact of the matter is we, as an industry, gaming hasn’t seen major price increases for quite some time. They probably should have raised the prices more incrementally to accommodate for rising costs. And partly that is because they require developers and a publisher and a marketing team and all of these things. And you could ask the question, how do indie developers do it? And the answer is they find ways around doing things like that. They do native marketing where just the people that are working there are doing the marketing and they hope the word gets out.

It’s not the same as a AAA game studio, which is really corporate gaming. Those studios have the funds. Those are the studios that are making the big games that you know and love and all of that stuff. So, not to say we don’t know and love indie games because I do, but I think that it is an interesting dichotomy of like, is it costing them more or less to have AI do things for them? That’s still a question that we as an industry in tech have not answered.

The promise is there. The promise is there that AI is going to speed things up, it’s going to cost less, but I don’t think that we have actually established that it is less expensive and they’re absolutely not going to send those savings down to the consumer. That’s never going to happen.

Sean Sebring:                     Yeah. Well, no. So, I think this leaves us with maybe a third piece of how it’s entered, at least from the end of the conversation here, a final thought, I suppose, is we have why would they use AI? And there’s a couple of obvious ones, but the big ones would be for fast production, I’ll call that one to stay relevant. It’s fast. You can do it quickly, which means you can stay relevant rather than waiting for your relevance to come in when you finally release.

And then, there’s resources. Is it because it would save me resources in some cases? No. In some cases, yes, like you had brought up. And then, the third one is creativity. Would it influence creativity actually? Would it give us more the generative aspect of things? And so, I’m just trying to look at it from a few different lenses from a gamer’s perspective, do I want faster content? As the gaming industry, am I more focused on the resources I’m going to pay for? So, slower stuff that costs less.

And then, finally is, I think the most important one as a gamer, what’s going to maximize the creativity where I can interact with my game and make sure it feels creative. Again, what did they call it? I had a term that was in here, AI slop, I think was the term. So, the creativity piece as a gamer is probably the most important to me because why would I play a game if it didn’t feel cool, if it wasn’t engaging? So, all three have to play a part in this, but geez, fun conversation. I think we could go for another hour.

Chrystal Taylor:                 We could probably go a lot more. I think one of the other things to consider with regards to this whole AI, you brought up AI slop. One thing that I’ve been thinking about is that, does this mean that we’re likely to get more buggy releases because they’ll be able to update more frequently so it won’t matter to them like, “Oh, we can just,” instead of doing an early access period, or actually they’re already doing this now, which is that they release games in early access. You still have to pay full price for it and then you can play it while it’s still in early access while they’re still working on the game.

Our games, all I’m thinking about is Fortnite and how it’s never really released a full release. It’s still, it’s like 10 years, 15 years now, and it’s still basically in early access. That’s a different question. But I think like, does this mean that there’s not going to be full releases of games anymore?

I mean, fundamentally, the industry is going to change, but for those types of things, do we no longer have big announcements and big release day things and like collectors’ editions and all of those things? Are those going to go away in the advent of like having a continuously updating type of game? Why do they need any of those other things? I don’t know. It’s interesting. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes over the next several years, but it’s going somewhere.

Sean Sebring:                     Yeah. I would say in a way, yes, in a way, no. We already see it. Take World of Warcraft, for example. It’s an exact answer to both questions, which is constant releases as well as bulk releases when a big story comes out to let you sit and savor the existing story while still releasing updates over and over again, and then a bulk announcement for a big new story change and a large expansion.

So, I mean, it’s definitely there, but I think we’re going to have more and more and more of the Fortnite concept where it’s like when a new game is identified, you can play it and it will never not be being updated. Exactly. It will never be done, which is really cool to think about.

Chrystal Taylor:                 Well, this has been super fun. Thank you for indulging us because we wanted to talk about it. I think that gaming is a subsect of tech and to ignore what’s going on over there is to ignore things that are already happening in tech as well, and we wanted to talk about it. So, thank you, Sean, for joining me down this crazy road.

Sean Sebring:                     Of course. Thanks, Chrystal.

Chrystal Taylor:                 And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this TechPod episode, please like, subscribe if you’d like, and you can find more episodes of TechPod where you listen to podcasts.