Video Games You Wish Existed

Reynard said:

When this stuff gets really good

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I don't think the current LLM approach is going to "get really good", because of three factors:

1) They're out of training material even having stolen everything that's not nailed down and a lot of stuff that was! There are attempts to circumvent this and stop it eating its own feces but they seem pretty desperate and not very effective so far. Basically throwing money at the problem, which as we all know often fails completely in tech.

2) It's genuinely very expensive to operate LLMs and it's not getting cheaper or paying for itself. No-one has a model yet which properly pays for itself, or can really even explain one that isn't just a fairly expensive usage-based charge or subscription. It's essentially currently a loss-leader balanced on the back of the hope and in some cases outright fantasies of a mixture of very senior tech execs and VCs, two groups not particularly known for "getting it right" reliably over the last 20-odd years. To even pay back some of the investments they're going have to charge some REALLY big money over the next decade.

3) LLMs aren't actually that well-understood, even by the people who created them, meaning it's much harder to refine the tech than it would be if it was well-understood. But to be clear, this isn't in a scary spooky way, it's just in a "we don't know how to make it do exactly what we want" way.

That's not to say it won't gain acceptance, but I suspect one of two paths to that is more likely:

A) Sheer time - gen A etc. are getting raised on this and likely will see it as intrinsic - if the financial bubble it's in doesn't burst before then (which won't eliminate it, but might hugely attenuate it). But that's like 15-20 years realistically, or more.

B) A different approach to all this prompt-based black box LLM stuff, probably starting in a way that doesn't have the same flaws (various paths are being researched, but it's a way out).

We shall see but I'm increasingly skeptical, rather than concerned, especially as current LLMs seem to have stalled for some time now and are even backsliding a bit in some ways. What progress has been made is unfortunately often tied to "Well if we used 10x as many processors and 10x as much power to do the thing 10x to get a marginally better result!", and that's also going to be 10x to 100x as expensive in most cases, and at least 10x as environmentally destructive (and the bills from the latter are only increasingly going to come due in the next decades).

I think about this a lot! I got to work for a video game company for about nine months before I started teaching (Toys for Bob, working on Skylanders: Giants), and a friend of mine from that company now owns his own video game company.

I would love it if there were RPGs designed to teach new languages. You play through a classic RPG with stores and maps and puzzles and enemies. But each level is teaching you the vocabulary and grammar of a new language. Maybe you want to learn Spanish, so the first levels are all about following directions, locating certain buildings in town, and identifying colors of enemies who are vulnerable to different attacks. Most of the game would be in English, but slowly more and more of the language would be replaced by Spanish (or whatever language you want to learn). I always thought this would be a cool, immersive way to learn a new language.

BookTenTiger said:

I think about this a lot! I got to work for a video game company for about nine months before I started teaching (Toys for Bob, working on Skylanders: Giants), and a friend of mine from that company now owns his own video game company.

I would love it if there were RPGs designed to teach new languages. You play through a classic RPG with stores and maps and puzzles and enemies. But each level is teaching you the vocabulary and grammar of a new language. Maybe you want to learn Spanish, so the first levels are all about following directions, locating certain buildings in town, and identifying colors of enemies who are vulnerable to different attacks. Most of the game would be in English, but slowly more and more of the language would be replaced by Spanish (or whatever language you want to learn). I always thought this would be a cool, immersive way to learn a new language.

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I have actually thought about using an RPG to teach language for years too. I have always thought I would take a different approach though: you are a stranger in a strange land where you do not speak the language. The game is designed so that you can do a lot of stuff without understanding what people are saying. But it incentivizes you to learn so you can fully understand what is happening around you.

Ruin Explorer said:

I don't think the current LLM approach is going to "get really good", because of three factors:

1) They're out of training material even having stolen everything that's not nailed down and a lot of stuff that was! There are attempts to circumvent this and stop it eating its own feces but they seem pretty desperate and not very effective so far. Basically throwing money at the problem, which as we all know often fails completely in tech.

2) It's genuinely very expensive to operate LLMs and it's not getting cheaper or paying for itself. No-one has a model yet which properly pays for itself, or can really even explain one that isn't just a fairly expensive usage-based charge or subscription. It's essentially currently a loss-leader balanced on the back of the hope and in some cases outright fantasies of a mixture of very senior tech execs and VCs, two groups not particularly known for "getting it right" reliably over the last 20-odd years. To even pay back some of the investments they're going have to charge some REALLY big money over the next decade.

3) LLMs aren't actually that well-understood, even by the people who created them, meaning it's much harder to refine the tech than it would be if it was well-understood. But to be clear, this isn't in a scary spooky way, it's just in a "we don't know how to make it do exactly what we want" way.

That's not to say it won't gain acceptance, but I suspect one of two paths to that is more likely:

A) Sheer time - gen A etc. are getting raised on this and likely will see it as intrinsic - if the financial bubble it's in doesn't burst before then (which won't eliminate it, but might hugely attenuate it). But that's like 15-20 years realistically, or more.

B) A different approach to all this prompt-based black box LLM stuff, probably starting in a way that doesn't have the same flaws (various paths are being researched, but it's a way out).

We shall see but I'm increasingly skeptical, rather than concerned, especially as current LLMs seem to have stalled for some time now and are even backsliding a bit in some ways. What progress has been made is unfortunately often tied to "Well if we used 10x as many processors and 10x as much power to do the thing 10x to get a marginally better result!", and that's also going to be 10x to 100x as expensive in most cases, and at least 10x as environmentally destructive (and the bills from the latter are only increasingly going to come due in the next decades).

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Based on interviews I have listened to with developers and people who should know, I don't think this is true. Brute force training is definitely seeing diminishing returns, but approaches to both training and models are constantly evolving. I think it is naive to just assume they won't get better and cheaper like every other technology ever.

Initially I was going to say a standalone Blitzball game (from FFX). Taking that a step further, a game with a bunch of fantastical sports included. They could be fantastical versions of normal sports, taking a lot of inspiration from NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, Mario Strikers, etc. Or they could be pure fantasy stuff like Blitzball, Ring Riding and Air Jousting (Dinotopia), Pro-bending (Legend of Korra), and Mage Tower (Strixhaven). Tell me you don't want to watch team Qunari vs team Drow for a chance to win a game of Legends of the Hidden Temple.

Oh, a Cy_borg game! A proper dark, gritty, filthy, cyberpunk game.

Dannyalcatraz said:

The games I wish existed are mostly updated versions of games I love that don’t exist as playable games/apps on anything I own. Most of them I can’t even find close analogs of.

And there’s reasons for that, I understand fully. But I REALLY miss certain games. OTOH, I’m not game-crazy enough to buy/build/upkeep legacy systems around merely to play them. And even if I did, some are not available anywhere anyway.

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Some examples:

Yahoo Online Games- Bubble Tanks
Heaven & Earth
Playmaker Football
Broadsides
Autoduel
Moebius
Escape Velocity
Abuse
Lunatic Fringe
Space Madness


And to be clear, I’d prefer to have them be as platform-neutral as possible. I use my iPad & iPhone for most of my computer needs, in part because my iMac is so old that I can’t use it for very much these days. (Hopefully replacing it with a laptop later this year.) But some of the games wouldn’t translate well to touch screens.

DeviousQuail said:

Initially I was going to say a standalone Blitzball game (from FFX). Taking that a step further, a game with a bunch of fantastical sports included. They could be fantastical versions of normal sports, taking a lot of inspiration from NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, Mario Strikers, etc. Or they could be pure fantasy stuff like Blitzball, Ring Riding and Air Jousting (Dinotopia), Pro-bending (Legend of Korra), and Mage Tower (Strixhaven). Tell me you don't want to watch team Qunari vs team Drow for a chance to win a game of Legends of the Hidden Temple.

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I suspect licencing would make combining them together impossible but I do think "fictional sports" games are a pretty rich vein which videogames only occasionally tap into, and we could stand to see more of them.

Reynard said:

Based on interviews I have listened to with developers and people who should know, I don't think this is true. Brute force training is definitely seeing diminishing returns, but approaches to both training and models are constantly evolving. I think it is naive to just assume they won't get better and cheaper like every other technology ever.

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I mean, I don't think there's much point arguing if you just believe this stuff, but hype, hope and outright lies are a major problem here because the insane amounts of money that have been pumped into LLM-based AI. Ed Zitron has been doing a good job covering the depth of outright lying that's been going on.

I think it's extremely naive to actually believe these people making these claims unless they back them up with very solid explanations of how it's going to happen, and that's the precise problem - virtually everyone involved in AI at a high level at this point is resorting to vagueness and "well in five years maybe..." (Demis Hassabis, who I used to have a ton of respect for was engaging in precisely this kind of puffery recently. Why? Because if the AI investment bubble bursts, his company and countless others will collapse, and he and his colleagues will personally lose out hugely). Demis Hassabis is exactly a "person who should know" as you say, but the issue is, he's too involved, too close to the issue. And again as Ed Zitron and others have pointed out, a lot of journalists who "should know better" are just repeating hype uncritically (or with with very little critical thinking).

More to the point, things don't get "cheaper and better" because it's a law of the universe or the like.

They get cheap and better through specific mechanisms, and very often there's a limit - we're seeing that with GPUs right now - they simply can't make the same kind of pure-power gains generation-on-generation they could before, and not only is that making them more expensive - the direct opposite of "cheaper", but they're also having to resort of software tricks which aren't as good as pure power was, which is also meaning that they're not really "better" (framegen for example, which is actually only useful if you already have a high fps - 60+!). I think that's a really good example of why it's downright silly to assume "cheaper and better" is inevitable. It's absolutely not happened with "every other technology ever" - on the contrary with most there's a period that happens, before it reverses, and you start getting smaller and smaller gains for greater and greater cost until a fundamentally different approach is taken. I believe there's good evidence that LLM-based approaches to AI (specifically, not SLM, not AGI) have already hit that point. I don't doubt "AI" in a general sense will be a major part of the future. It's massive LLMs running on gigantic overheated datacenters I'm very skeptical about.

I won't argue this further and take us any further off-topic, I mean it's your thread so I thought it was reasonable to respond here, but if you want to discuss it more maybe we should take it to another thread?

DeviousQuail said:

They could be fantastical versions of normal sports,

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A basketball game set in a LotR-style world could be a lot of fun, and could have characters spouting lines like:

“They have a cave troll!”
“You shall not pass!”
“That only counts as one!”