With GDC Underway, Play Hitman | AI and Games Newsletter
With GDC Underway, Play Hitman | AI and Games Newsletter
GDC is sort of like Hitman: big crowds, odd scenes, and the occasional obnoxious person. But in Hitman you can kill them with exploding golf balls!
The AI and Games newsletter has been in publication since the start of 2024 over on LinkedIn, as a means to summarise my output and the state of the industry. You can catch up with previous issues on LinkedIn, but starting this week it will now also appear on Substack as well!
Hello all, Tommy Thompson here with the GDC edition of the AI and Games newsletter. Well, I say GDC edition not because we're going to be talking about the Game Developers Conference, but simply because this is being published while the event is happening right now in San Francisco.
A quick aside, but with over 5,000 subscribers across our Substack and LinkedIn audiences, now is a great time to consider sponsoring the AI and Games newsletter. Visit our sponsorship page for more details.
AI and Games / GDC 2024
I had the foresight to write this newsletter in advance given I simply don't have time to be writing this week - spoiler: all of my newsletters are written in advance, it's just a bit more obvious this time.
At the time of publication, I will have spent the last two days hearing great talks from developers at Treyarch, Rocksteady Studios Ltd, Hidden Door, modl.ai, Ubisoft, Kythera AI, Unity and more about the work they're conducting in and around artificial intelligence for video games. I plan to report back and summarise a lot of the work I've seen in a future newsletter.
In addition, I will be spending the rest of the week in meetings and the odd talk where time permits. On that note, if you're at GDC right now and want to meet, visit my Calendly page for any available times I have left this week. It's filling up fast!
But in the meantime, there's plenty more to share!
AI in the News
While there's plenty to be talking about here at GDC, there were some notably events that cropped up that certainly merit further discussion!
Google's SIMA Learns General AI Behaviours from Video Games
Google last week announced their latest breakthrough in AI named SIMA: the Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent. SIMA is a system that learns to follow natural-language-based instructions in video game environments. The system is capable of achieving short-duration activities in a variety of games including Teardown, No Man's Sky, and Goat Simulator. This is great for someone like me, who continues to find Goat Simulator as confusing as it can be fun. Without a doubt this will be a topic we dig into further on the AI and Games YouTube channel in the future.
The EU Votes to Approve AI Regulation
The European Union voted last week to put their proposed AI regulations into law. This isn't an overnight process, but will see a suite of laws come into effect across EU member states over the next few months. Enforcement of these laws will happen in stages, giving companies time to ensure they align with these regulations.
The laws cover a variety of facets of how modern AI technologies are built, including:
A taxonomy on what qualifies as 'risk' in the context of AI systems.
Requirements for AI systems to be licensed and approved by the EU if they are qualify in higher risk tiers.
The need to respect copyright law, and not generate material that is infringing on the rights of others.
Prevention of AI adoption for citizen surveillance (outside of military application).
Disclosure of training assets and processes for machine learning systems.
While I have yet to unpack this in full detail, my initial thoughts are that the impacts of this regulation on game development will be relatively minor for most of the norms in the sector. However, it will have an impact on the rollout of generative AI in the space, and may well impede it further.
I'll be back with a follow-up on this at a later date once I've had a chance to dig further into the fine print of the EU's AI framework.
I'll Leave You to Prepare...
But while all of this * waves hands * AI stuff is certainly interesting. It's important we make time to have some fun. Even if having fun means executing a drug lord by swapping out his favourite golf balls for explosives.**
On the AI and Games Substack, I revisit a classic episode - and reprint the blog for all you scholars out there too. The AI of the Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy is one of the most interesting examples of non-player character and system gameplay design in recent memory. Building a fiction that allows for players to assume the role of Agent 47, sneaking into a myriad of complex scenarios and eliminating targets as gracefully, or as ridiculously, as you'd like.
Check the YouTube video above, or the Substack link to find out more.
Closing
That's everything for this week's newsletter. Thanks for reading, and be sure to stick around on for future updates. I'll be back with the first of no doubt several GDC-related updates next week.
Don't forget you can support AI and Games on both Patreon and Substack, and if you're interested in business opportunities and collaborations, please visit our dedicated page!
** In truth it's a lot more complicated that it sounds to kill Silvio Caruso. Given we sneak into the compound of Caruso's business partner Francesca De Santis, find the location of Caruso's golf coach (who is currently having an affair with De Santis and has been given on-site accommodation) and then lure him to the room, knock him out and assume their persona.*** We then need to ensure we have the explosive-injected golf ball primed, arrange a practice session with Caruso and then swap the balls out when he is not looking.
*** Also, if you're hiding in the golf coach's room, you can then lure De Santis for a little romantic rendezvous, and poison her glass of wine. Two birds, one stone etc.
Don't say I don't do anything for you!