A full game made from AI without an engine. Tim Sweeney is not amused.
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Interesting. Not sure I agree with that but it does sound like the opinion a lot of the gamers I see on forums. I don't think some of the old masters of game design were thinking about "gameplay loops" in the past. It's more the work of relatively modern post-mortems trying to make the art of fun into rigorous theory. My only rule for a game is interactivity. Walking simulators may be poor examples of entertainment, but they are still games. Maybe AI could only make shitty games.
Them not using the specific term for it doesn't mean it wasn't part of their development process.
Mario 64 had a gameplay loop of "enter painting level, get star, get kicked out of level, repeat until unlocking next area." The loop was clearly noted because its one of the major changes Odyssey would do away with later after many iterations of playing with it. Heck, handhelds as an entire system were built with something resembling a "gameplay loop" in mind because most of them were designed to be played in short chunks instead of longer sit down sessions.
A gameplay loop is just the most distilled down bones of what the game wants you to do with the mechanics it presents you.
The modern issue is that the "loop" is now designed less in the interest of fun or soul, and more to create addiction via skinner boxes and other nonsense. Cart before the horse design, which is why it has such a negative connotation. An AI can create a loop the same as anyone, but because its designing it in that cart before horse manner it'll usually be quite shitty.
It's a problem of "desconstructing" something in an attempt to define it in simple terms, which end up being entirely alien to the original intent. I'm fairly certain this is the reason that AI feeding upon it's own output produces progressively worse products. It may very well be that, by the constraints of programming, such loops do emerge within a game's design. Yet if you try and focus on such things alone you end up with progressively worse results.
That's inevitable when things go from "a bunch of dudes from various backgrounds come together to create a passion project" to a literal industry with college classes, billion dollar corporations with management giving powerpoint slides, and an entire legion of "game dev" video series on Youtube.
Things that everyone just understood now need a name so they can be compartmentalized and taught separate from the whole so they people who lack the extreme passion and talent of the old masters can still understand and create from it by eventually assembling those pieces.
Its not necessarily a good thing, but that's just a problem with our education system in general. Like, for those of us who were just capable of math from the outset the systems upon systems that teachers use to teach people who cannot do math the ability to do basic shit look completely alien and retarded. But its probably the only way they can grasp it, regardless of how slower and soulless it is.
That's very much the issue I take with such things. Our whole concept of what progress should look like is built upon elevating people beyond their own abilities, and it's causing our entire society to collapse under the weight of collective incompetence.
I disagree. Gameplay loops come from programming in what it is a very simple and early game called: "The Game of Life" by John Conway.
The whole point of The Game of Life, is you are given an arena, a set of basic rules, and you may choose a starting position. The results will then vary and generate different experiences with your input. This is the interactivity of which you speak. The gameplay loop is how you interact with the program, it is the rule set.
The reason The Game of Life is useful as an example here is because it is a "zero-player" game, with no objectives, and yet is fulfills the basic tenets of what a game must have to be a 'game' or specifically what we think of as a "video game". You're not even competing against anything, you are simply interacting with the rule-set. The core gameplay loop is the rule-set, and the passage of time.
Games do not even necessarily need to be fun, but they have to cause some kind of human emotion. In this case, it's curiosity. And the level of detail within this simple rule-set that humans can input is shockingly large.
Even the earliest game that is known to exist has a similar function. The Royal Game of Ur it has 2 players competing against each other to get to the end of the board. It uses dice to add random chance for movement, and betting to add additional risk and reward. Despite this game emerging from the the earliest human civilization to ever exist as far as we are aware, once you have the rules, it is actually a quite entertaining and competitive game that combines both chance and strategy. Again, the basic rule set is the environment you are operating in, and the loop is each each iteration of positioning against your opponent.
You could create an AI that could follow some basic mathematical equation for what a good game should entail, but the entertainment value in the aesthetic and variations still need to come from humans.