Video gamimg’s AI future
John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity Technologies, has seen the video game industry evolve and shift during his more than two-decades in the industry, beginning in 1997 when he became CEO of games giant Electronic Arts.
Now he’s turning his attention to artificial intelligence, which he says will transform the way video games are created and played. Unity, a video game development software company founded in Denmark and based in San Francisco, is now working with Apple to help bring games to its upcoming virtual reality headset, the Vision Pro.
What are the biggest trends coming down the pike in gaming?
I think AI will change gaming and in a couple of pretty profound ways. One of them is it’s going to make making games faster, cheaper and better. It’s already happening. I mean, you know, you can use AI already for digital humans and editing environments and all sorts of things that make it faster. It’s also going to be possible to realize experiences that were never possible before.
Can you give some examples?
You know “Call of Duty,” you know “Grand Theft Auto,” you know “Candy Crush.” Any of these games, every single thing you see in that game and every line of dialogue, every environment, every lighting effect was coded by somebody anticipating that you would use that. So the perimeter of the game is the content that’s been put on the DVD or on the Internet download. There is no more. It is what it is. They can add to it over time by patching games and adding levels. “Candy Crush” shipped with like 50 and now it’s what?
10,000 I think.
So they keep adding to it. But each one is a contained experience. So, I was involved in launching The Sims in 2000, and it was wonderful game. And you know how they used “Simlish,” right? Did you know why? Because there’s so many things you can do in the Sims, it’s like a crazy number of interactions you can have because you’re actually creating characters. Those characters interact with each other. No writer, could ever write all the appropriate dialogue for that. It would be as big as the Library of Congress when you’re done.
I think I know where you are going with this.
You know where I’m going, I’m sure. In the way that GPT 4 works, you can define the parameters. A player could do this or the game studio could do it. The game studio could allow the player to do this, to describe this character or their motivations, in the same way you write in prompts, to get dialogue back. And they could do this for all their characters in advance. And the AI could spawn in any language you want English, Russian, Japanese, French, doesn’t matter. I think that’s a breakthrough. It is actually really hard to overstate how important that is. It’s alive.