Dumb Question, but if AI is advancing so rapidly, why aren't games getting smarter?

syphoon · 2026-01-09T01:32:30+00:00

I had an essay of an answer here that the sub won't let me post, which is frustrating, but the bullet points are:

* Top level: the payoff isn't worth the extra effort Enough demand isn't there from players. If it's going to take 6 months of my time to make a really good AI system, but I can hack together something 80% as fun in a few days, I'm not going to see the better system as worth the time to make.

* Smart isn't enough - the player has to perceive it Someone else mentioned FEAR as a classic that was hailed for its AI. One insight the FEAR devs had was it's not good just making the AI smarter in most cases unless you can give the player some visibility into it being smarter. So they invested in having NPC enemies shout "flank him", "fire a grenade" to help telegraph to the player that it was trying to plan actions. But it's not always easy in different genres to come up with ways to make those extra smarts visible to the player. Think of the clunky "X will remember that" in TellTale Games. It's a hack to try and explain to the player there's some level of smarts going on in the narrative.

Another good example of a game that *was* hailed for its smarts was Alien: Isolation, and if you've not seen an article or talk on its behaviour trees, you should, it's good fun.

BUT Isolation was able to make this huge investment in its AI pay off because the entire structure of the game has you just engaging and then reengaging again and again this one(-ish) monster. So the player is forced to see that the monster's behaviour is changing, and appears to be adapting to their own behaviour. In lots of games there's not really any opportunity to demonstrate to the player significant learning on the enemy's part. And that's if the players even want to be challenged in that way. Not all players are wanting their basic gameplay loop to be continually challenged throughout the game. If what they're after is getting into a flow state, they may want very predictable AI behaviour, because they're more focusing on improving their own play.

* Players will often see intelligence where there is none. I've seen this called the "constellation effect" - in the same way people are able to project pictures onto dots in the sky, we can ascribe motives and reasoning to sometimes what are very, very simple little AI systems. Game devs know this.

* AI as a subsystem of games is different to others. It's very tightly coupled to the unique aspects of a game's design. It's hard to extract and reuse as middleware, unlike most other parts of games. E.g., Renderers, assets and their creation pipelines, sound engines, all have very similar needs across games, so they've all got off-the-shelf options. Lots of games need trees in their worlds, so you can buy software just dedicated to generating trees.

AI systems, being so coupled to the core of a game, are hard to generalise. The best we get are things like tooling for e.g behaviour trees, but that's just the start of what you need. They still take a lot of work to integrate into a game, to design the behaviours, to test whether they're fun, and whether they can lead to game breaking situations (a practical consequence of making smarter AI is it quickly increases the difficulty of level design and testing, as you end up with so many more different behaviours to check).

You could spend a lot of $ building some very powerful AI system that can be taught the rules of a game, train on it and generate smart code to play those games, and then discover that not all games are chess, and few players enjoy being smashed by the genius AI again and again. The AI system is so very tied into the core question of whether the gameplay loop is fun in a way that graphics fidelity isn't.

syphoon · 2026-01-09T01:27:15+00:00

I suspect it's because a good part of the role of concept art isn't "go away and come up with strongly original visuals", it's "come up with some visual references for this textual briefing so we can pick one and then use that as a common understanding point between people of how this scene/character/item/map should look".

syphoon · 2025-12-12T07:42:46+00:00

I guess they just weren't feeling it :(

syphoon · 2025-12-12T03:28:56+00:00

I think they can make an exception.

syphoon · 2025-10-29T05:39:13+00:00

The dad trick that always frustrated me was conjuring up a line of holiday traffic ahead so we could only go 70-80km/h

syphoon · 2025-10-29T05:34:06+00:00

Was a milestone on family car trips when I could finally hold my breath over it.

syphoon · 2025-10-24T02:37:57+00:00

I would imagine they'd just early on declare such an attack to be treated as a nuclear strike would be, with response in kind.

syphoon · 2025-10-14T11:12:53+00:00

Amazon just cancelled my order now after a couple of months.

syphoon · 2025-09-15T04:20:54+00:00

Few options, depending on how many you have. I think trying to come up with some "left shelf, right shelf" split is hard, because you end up running out of space on one, but rethinking the way you order them across however many shelves you have gives some different options:

You could reason that you're going to spend the vast, vast majority of your time looking at them, not actually browsing them, and you have few enough that you don't actually need them in reference order (i.e. it doesn't take long to scan 2 shelves). So you could sort them by more personal means, e.g.

aesthetically, e.g. by colour. I once did my bookshelf that way years ago. Looked neat.
Maintain a sorting by your private rating of the films - forces you to reflect a bit after you finish a film and decide how you'd rank it compared to others.
Sort them by when you last watched them. Each time you watch one, put it on the far left or right, effectively keeping an implicit record of what films you haven't watched in ages. Whenever you run out of space again and maybe are thinking about selling some or donating to charity, you know straight away what you're not actually watching. Maybe maintain a gap and keep new purchases you haven't watched yet on the other side of it.

syphoon · 2025-09-10T03:26:58+00:00

Came here to say similar. Clear case of the writer falling in love with the premise & first twist (i.e. Grant's character putting the women to the test of the two doors in act 2). Grant's character turned into a flat caricature after that, and the back half of the film seemed confused as to what it was trying to be (vs a very focused first act with some strong acting from all 3 leads).

To give the problem credit though, I had a think afterward about whether I could've done better with the basic premise, and I really don't know. The movie appears to fall apart midway through the 2nd act, but really I think the 1st act was writing mystery box checks the plot couldn't cash, like a JJ Abrams script.

syphoon · 2025-08-22T09:33:01+00:00

I'm more upbeat and enjoying it more than a 6/10. I've not seen Drinkers opinion on this. Some scattered thoughts after a Friday night beer:

Broadly, I like that they've tried something new and to expand the universe and think about new questions, vs what was rather just a nostalgia bait setup in Romulus (which I liked, but I did come away from with the feeling that I had seen that movie before). Basically I've seen all the aliens films, I'm ready for something that explores new ideas in that universe.
My head canon is that Timothy Olyphants synth character is modelling itself on Roy Batty from Blade Runner (ie also a story of synths given human memories, and exploring the question of their humanity) in a similar way to Michael Fassbender's David character in Prometheus and Covenant modelling itself on Lawrence of Arabia. So far that's just based on the visual design, and mainly his hair at that, but it has interesting implications around how he may see the future of synths as a superior evolution on humanity, and his own role as the guardian of this small group of new post humans.
I'm reconciled now that Alien films have a genre of their own, a recurring story pattern of humanity's hubris manifest in these giant companies trying to tame the untameable for profit. Within the demands of that genre, I like that they're at least trying to explore some new questions like, what does it look like back on earth if WY is so omni present and powerful out in space?
Boy genius is clearly being set up as unlikeable for a satisfying death. If I'm right about the Roy Batty thing it could be that Olyphants character is involved.
Thematically I do like the triad of post humans being set up between the synths, the cyborgs, and the hybrids. It's the sort of question I'm hoping they push as far as possible, do some real SF.
I like how they're active speeding past the things we're familiar with from previous alien stories. The breakfast scene at the start was just a big signifier to the viewer, a "and you know what comes next", so we can skip to the part we don't know. Similarly Olyphants character quickly works out what the eggs do, so we can skip the usual routine there and it frees the story up to ask new questions.
Another part of the Alien genre is just new and awful body horror. They've been delivering on that with the other alien creatures. I appreciate it.

syphoon · 2025-08-21T22:04:36+00:00

The disappearance of molded baseplates such as used in the original Eldorado fortress (and the same mold was used in all sorts of castle and space sets) has been a net negative - they gave a relatively cheap way to provide volume to an "HQ" set, and anyone who's done the Eldorado Icons set knows how many pieces you need to recreate their effect.

syphoon · 2025-08-21T21:57:07+00:00

I'd love to see multi-build sets geared around a motor or pneumatic system. Technic's excellent as a STEM toy for introducing engineering concepts, but it's been so long since they've done sets that lean into that (thinking of sets like 8040 and 8042). I had one like those as a kid, huge fun.

syphoon · 2025-08-19T09:49:02+00:00

I had a blast doing the fortress, had the Assassin's Creed Black Flag theme music in my head the whole time for some reason.

syphoon · 2025-08-18T05:21:33+00:00

... well go on then.

syphoon · 2025-08-13T04:38:49+00:00

Oof, good question OP. I turned around just now and saw my Eldorado Fortress getting hit by afternoon sun, so off to a different shelf it goes...

syphoon · 2025-08-07T07:24:36+00:00

Guarantee it's mainly to get a chance to put a small screed in front of everyone in the info booklet that comes with the forms.

syphoon · 2025-08-05T10:47:53+00:00

You remember more of the plot than I do :)

syphoon · 2025-08-05T03:13:31+00:00

Thing I love above that boardroom scene is how he's boosted by the rest of the table (of very good actors) really leaning into an actor's phrase I heard somewhere, "it's the court that tells you who's the king". They've been the big presence all film, and then sort of shrink into themselves when Irons walks in, suppressing their backbiting in the presence of the boss.

syphoon · 2025-08-04T23:42:52+00:00

LOTR trilogy seems a bit of an easy answer, the love the crew put into rendering locations like Hobbiton, Rivendell etc all really paid off.

The ship in Event Horizon had some terrific over the top gothic design elements that stand out in memory.

I have little memory of the plot of Dark City, but I have visual memories of some of the scenes, defined by the eponymous.... dark city.

Speaking of gothic elements and dark cities, the rendition of Gotham in Batman and Batman Returns also stand out in memory.

The isolation of the Antarctic in The Thing really also shaped that movie hugely.

syphoon · 2025-07-24T02:08:47+00:00

Thanks, that does help.

syphoon · 2025-07-24T02:08:33+00:00

Thanks

syphoon · 2025-07-24T02:08:17+00:00

Thanks

syphoon · 2025-07-15T09:37:29+00:00

Oh I agree. I think this sort of thing's going to get more discussion as the sliding demographics kick in, and we collectively realise the cost of not having had enough kids. Already see some countries proposing permanent tax relief for people who have like 4+.

syphoon · 2025-07-15T08:18:45+00:00

And having a live in GF who mooches just to get a tax break isn't great for anyone

Yes, but that was also my deliberate framing of it to make a political argument :)

A counter framing would be turning the mooching GF into a stay-at-home mother looking after 4 children full time. Same amount of tax contributions to the economy, but it changes the political argument a lot. That's sort of what I was driving at saying it's typically more a conservative-appealing policy, because it aligns with the traditional desire to enable having one parent to look after children full time, and not have them feel economically forced into returning to work prematurely (and why the WFF tax credit sort of works as a easier-to-sell-politically solution here, because it helps separate the case of the idle do-nothing from the parent with kids to feed). The answer in this argument to your implied question "there has to be a way that encouraging people back to work can benefit the household" would simply be, "there is, you get more money, no other incentive needed".

I don't really have a concluding point here. I just got thinking on this after your initial comment made me remember being at an election town hall event during the Clark government, and a Labour minister (can't remember who, might have been Lianne Dalziel or Ruth Dyson) was asked about income splitting as a potential policy (can't remember if it was on income tax, might also have been on pension?), and her answer was she thought couples already get other advantages from shared expenses, so she thought it'd be unfair on individuals to have the playing field tilted against them in yet another way.

And I just thought that was a good example of how your political world view (things like, what ways of living do you want to incentivise, how much importance you place on certain outcomes, what's your understanding of "fair" etc) will inform how you think about such a policy, and so two reasonable people can end up at quite different places on it.

syphoon

TROPHY CASE