The Other Side: Game Dev Tim Cain Isn’t Helping In The AI In Gaming Debate

You’re all sick of me saying we need to have more nuance in the discussion about AI use in the gaming industry. I get it. I’m also not going to stop. And I hope you will have noticed that I have called for nuance in both directions. While I’m more optimistic than many in our community that there is a place for this technology in the industry, and that it could actually have some net positive effects therein, I’m also not blind to the potential negative consequences. Concerns about industry jobs are a very real thing. A desire to protect the artistic intent of game makers is a worthy enterprise. Quality of output is paramount.

That’s why I’ve been repeating over and over again that we should be talking about how AI will be used in games, not if. The “if” question has already been answered in the affirmative, at least for some portion of the industry. Now we need to build very real guardrails around the “how.”

And, to be frank, comments such as those from Fallout co-creator Tim Cain are wildly unhelpful in the opposite direction.

Fallout co-creator Tim Cain says a world where AI generates games, TV shows, and even doctor’s appointments is inevitable, and he’s even “looking forward” to that future.

In arguably the veteran game developer’s saddest “fun Friday” video ever, Cain envisions a world in which dead MMOs come back to life with AI-generated players mimicking real-life personalities, where generative AI makes Joey from Friends a lawyer instead of a struggling actor, and where you take vacations in VR. Yes, really.

He goes way, way beyond even that. He talks at some length about using AI to create more episodes of retired shows that people still hunger for. As a massive fan of Firefly, I can’t tell you how ecstatic I’ve been these past several weeks with Nathan Fillion’s announcement that the show would be coming back in an animated form to build on the story that was infamously canceled by Fox after only 1 season. If that announcement was instead made by the rightsholder and said the new episodes would be created whole cloth using AI and that they would be customizable and tailored to my desires, my reaction would have been horror, not excitement.

AI needs to be a tool on the perimeter, not the creative force itself. I don’t want the pen telling me the story of Odysseus; I want the writer to use the pen to do so. And if the pen turns into a typewriter, which then turns into a word processor, that all works. There is still a human being telling the story.

Even Cain’s remarks tailored specifically for the gaming industry ring super hollow.

Cain goes on to say this will be especially handy for MMO players, in particular those who miss being able to play games that aren’t active anymore. “Have an AI make a local server,” he proposes. “Great, now you can play it again. Oh, it’s empty? Fill it with AI players. Have it watch videos of people who have played that game and just fill it up with players, and it mimics their personalities.”

Look, Cain is a veteran of the industry who was instrumental to one of the most beloved video game IPs of all time, but with all due respect, the idea of playing Ultima Online with AI-generated players designed to mimic the personalities of my friends who I used to play with… is genuinely one of the grimmest, most dire, dystopian realities I can possibly fathom. Likewise, my heart sinks at the thought of playing AI-generated stories with AI-generated characters that I can change however I want. That sounds like it would entirely rob a game, or any work of art, of its artistic intent. But alas, Cain reckons this is all inevitable, so get ready.

This is what the AI detractors are worried about. And when you hear an industry veteran speak so glowingly about gamers operating within these soulless arenas designed merely to mimic the authentic fun that these games produced, it’s easy to understand the concern. This isn’t helpful. Pretending to not understand that the very fucking point of MMOs is to play with other human beings in a single realm, not ginned-up robots pretending to be human, is incredibly frustrating.

And Cain, oddly enough, seems completely unconcerned with artistic intent at all. There is no reason why his example of requesting changes to a TV show wouldn’t translate into a video game. And if people can just customize games not through mods, but through fundamental changes driven by AI requests, then there is no game anymore. There is merely a shell of a game where the player is then free to remix it to extents that transform the intent of the maker completely.

I had to search around a lot to see if Cain was being sarcastic or making a fake attempt at over the top AI evangelism purely to make a point. Everything I have seen and read indicates that’s not what this was. And, again, that makes all of this very unhelpful if you want to get into some real discussions about where this technology should be used and where it shouldn’t.