AI Enters the Video Game Sector as a Design Aid
AI’s Impact on the Video Game Industry
“AI is a bit like the straw that broke the camel’s back in the video game industry,” observes Matheo Hingray. While this level designer, a creative role that conceptualizes the levels of a video game, is not worried about his job, he sees several of his colleagues turning away from the industry, fearing the future.
It is true that the economic context is bleak. The workforce, between 10,000 and 15,000 employees, has stopped growing. “We have never had so few job offers since we started recording statistics in 2010,” notes Emmanuel Forsans, director general of the French Agency for Video Games. “We had 600 job offers in France at the time, compared to an average of 350, and today we are at 120.”
While business leaders and professional associations assure that artificial intelligence (AI) has no connection with this movement, it is clear that use cases are multiplying in parallel. “Almost no studio publishes an advertisement in which it mentions AI, because it is seen as evil. Employees are collectively up in arms. Individually, it’s more nuanced, because some use it. Not a single programmer doesn’t use it,” testifies Mr. Forsans.
“We are not going to generate things that we use as is,” describes Matheo Hingray. “For developers, it will be used like a Google search, especially when facing a bug. For me, it allows me to find ideas faster.”
Potentially Infinite Narration
At the creative level, the start-up X & Immersion offers studios the ability to automatically generate lines of text for characters, generate their voices, and ensure lip synchronization, i.e., animate the movement of characters in 3D. Repetitive tasks, according to its co-founder Côme Demarigny: “With our tool, on the remake of the game L’Amerzone, the Microids studio was able to obtain 140,000 lines of dialogue in ten minutes, with three days of rework behind it.”
According to him, one can also imagine in the future games that use AI as a “main interaction mechanic,” with a potentially infinite narration, and characters to whom one could almost speak as to chatbots, who would have almost an answer to everything, within the limits of the game’s context.
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