Ryan K. Rigney

Can I be honest for a sec? Regarding LLMs in gaming, I feel more confused than ever. And I would like my peers and other people who are familiar in this field to chime in. It’s barely been a week since I made my post about distancing myself from a vibe coded project made by my friend in Smash. I even said “AI has no place in gaming”. After I made that post, I was reached out to by multiple colleagues in the space and people hired full time in software development. They educated me severely on the topic and I feel dumb now for my earlier sentiments. I was informed by my colleagues that it is now the norm to do 90% (and this is low estimate apparently) of all your coding with AI assistance or vibe coding. 75% of all new code at Google is made by AI and engineer approved. The vast majority of all the apps we use now are updated or maintained with AI coding - I imagine that also goes for Twitter, the very app you’re reading this on. So I figured okay - it’s here to stay in all software development - but where does that leave video games? I saw the posts from Epic Games, XBOX, and other publishers that seem to embrace the new era instead of rejecting it. In the last week I’ve been sent about a dozen different projects like this one that dissect and reintegrate Melee in multitudes of creative ways. One of them is even a build of Melee that runs natively at 120FPS and one of them simulates the feeling of a CRT almost perfectly. Some of them feel silly and useless, like low effort projects someone probably gave a single prompt and an ISO of Melee to build. Actual slop. And yet some feel like legitimately useful things that the community or people practicing could benefit from. I’m doing my best to navigate what is clearly a rapidly changing sector, especially when we regard the question of “Are Video Games Art?” And since they clearly are art, does that render AI in its development a bastardized amalgamation of what’s been “learned” from people with actual original ideas? Or is it strictly optimal to use AI in game development because games ARE software and therefore a necessary tool to wield in this day and age? I am making this post because I need more guidance on this topic and I feel open discussion on it might be the best way to do that.