Yeah, you can make more stuff , but no one cares. Plastic used to be so rare and luxury , now most of them are crap. Software is the same. Creating software is becoming a practice that produces a tiny bit convenience at the price of sustainability.

Creating software like this, yes

Which is why it's so sad to hear of a kid's dreams being destroyed like this... : (

Music generation, image generation all suffer the same way. You can make some beautiful stuff sometimes, but it (almost) always comes out 'hollow'.

I mean, are we pretending that this is a surprise?

I know we've spent the better part of the last century debating what "art" is, but I think we have fairly conclusive evidence that it isn't this.

No intention behind it, no human connection, none of the things we seek to find in art (including video games).

Everyone needs to read the famous essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). He wrote about the Industrial Revolution, but his points become ever more salient in the age of AI.

His central thesis is the concept of "aura": the difference between a carefully crafted work of art and a mechanically mass-produced, but otherwise identical, object. When you describe something as "hollow", that's what's missing.

I think if you read the article, you’ll find there was some human connection there…

With music generation, it's good to not go all the way up the chain of abstraction.

Generate the synths, the DAW, the bass-line, the vocals, but never the whole thing. You can (and should) still compose by hand. The act of composing should be fun enough that you want to do it manually, otherwise you're not really the one making the song.

Also, a minimal amount of music theory knowledge helps significantly.

Why on earth would you generate any of those things when there are fantastic tools made by people that are time tested?

You don't have to, but it's another option that now exists.

I don't use generative UI either but I don't question why someone would be interested in it. The world is bigger than you think.

Also, making a DAW using agents is just fun.

Tools like?

Reaper, FL Studio, Ableton Live, ...

Or pick up an instrument and try your hand at it.

It's kind of fun making your own synth sounds from 2 oscillating sine/square/sawtooth waves. Apologies if this isn't what you meant.

The music industry has already been through this gutting through hyper-abundance.

Huge numbers of people are going to spend billions of hours playing GTA6 though, and that won’t be scarce once it finally arrives.

There is only one highly anticipated 500 million triple AAA gangster open world simulation games in 2026. Usually there is only one every 5 years ago.

Arguably, the music industry has been in this state for years, at least since 2010's or even 2000's when it became possible to make quality sound with relatively small investments. I feel like AI music didn't really change much for an average listener.

The Billboard 100 agrees.

"Art is born of constraint, thrives on struggle, dies of freedom."

Spent 3 years struggling with the netcode, my game is ass. Kinda wish I'd outsourced that part lol

Network code is magic, not art. Let the bot do it. Get back to the game.

I remember setting a "4 minute World 1 in Mario 3" as my personal "4 minute mile" in elementary school and the thrill of actually achieving it.

I spent a full summer trying to beat the Dam level in the NES teenage mutant ninja turtle game and never did it. one of my biggest failures in life.

>The other night I carelessly made an infinite runner game while watching TV and the feeling of sheer abundance quickly faded into a bit of depression. Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

This is just a lack of ambition. LLMs allow one to make far more sophisticated games than ever before, even as a single developer, and if doing so development still takes many months even if running an agent 24/7.

That's not really true. Music is still valuable even though the value of music people write themselves is already practically 0 and has been for a very long time. Same with paintings. People are always looking for a connection. Just because some exists now doesn't mean it automatically earns it. It has to have something else going for it. I think that promises a bright future for creaters and consumers of that creativity.

The real treasure is the friends we make along the way... Only: We would we even embark on a journey.

Yep. It's like when you discover emulation and ROMs for the first time. The initial thrill and excitement of all these games... then you play a few minutes on each and it feels pointless. AI is going to destroy so many things we love.

Everything is going to be pretty hollow without human connection, no? Playing those games and sharing in the experience with friends from school was fun. People used to talk about strats, secrets, or even just the best parts of stuff.

Playing online games in servers across the late 90s and into the 2000s, it was easy enough to pick up connections with regular players. Forums existed for organising events, sharing screenshots of things we didn't expect, and for making mods together. Custom maps and all sorts of things were produced through the decisions made with blood, sweat, and tears.

imo - using LLMs for anything creative - coding, prose, documentation is anti-community building, and anti-creative.

> Growing up, games were such a scarce commodity that you'd really suck all the marrow out and spend hours beating your best times, looking for Easter eggs, or messing with custom maps and mods

I can relate to this, today when I play games I do still try to get them 100% complete but new generations do not seem to appreciate that. I see that they complete the game with minimal hours and move on to the next one.

My main relaxation hobby has always been video games.

I finally, about 10 years ago, made the conscientious decision that I didn't need to finish a game if I wasn't enjoying it, when before I'd always just pushed through no matter what. Mainly that there's more good games being made than I'll ever have the time to play, whereas when I was younger it was more the opposite.

I probably spent 18 months almost exclusively on Quake2, with the multiplayer mod scene.

AI let us conquer some squares in the game, but many others are still there: the software/game/picture ... you make is the result of your prompt which reflects your personality and creativity, it's where the "man bites dog" happens, whether the user or the machine made it, a carbon brain still thinks about it. Nobody complains about the vast majority of programmers not being able anymore to optimize their code by hand editing .asm sources produced by a compiler, just like nobody does if they can't place a bodge wire on a pcb to correct a bug, or for that matter doctors not being able to prepare penicillin at home or astronomers build their own lenses and telescopes. We moved forward; what makes all of this valuable is the ability to recognize the squares that follow in order to conquer them.

I wouldn’t discount the need for craft and deep knowledge in order to make advances — I don’t think bringing our own take on man bites dog will get us the hard yards

> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

This is why we have to go to Mars.

> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

That's subjective.

No that's human psychology 101. We can argue what it means for something to be truly valuable, but thats how our subconsciousness evaluates things

That's bs. I live largely without scarcity and the only pain points are the remaining bits of scarcity. The rest is bliss I'm very appreciative of.

Why would a new infinite runner be something anyone would actually want to play, instead of the hundreds of already existing infinite runners, unless there's a good addition to the core mechanics? How long did you actually want to play it yourself?

What makes or breaks just about any indie game is a brilliant core loop, or on the other end of the spectrum a novel "feeling" / aesthetic. Latter especially visible in the horror genre. Then after the original, there's the tail of variants that can do pretty well for the next 6 months of so, and it's exhausted, which is the part AI affects the most as of now.

There's countless examples of indie games crafted with care over multiple years, with great looking (but sort of bland) graphics, that have not done well.

Further, even before AI, a lot of people whose games didn't make it, did not at all have a grasp on what counts as a finished and well crafted game. Same applies to music. It's clearer in sports where (for example) the insanity of a marathon ran in 2:00-2:10 is easy for all to see.

Zero ads? No pay to win? Playing out your own idea/fantasy? And generally zero obnoxious money-grabbing behavior.

For me, part of the attraction to even single player games is a shared experience. Individually tailored games cannot deliver that.

It'd be like watching generated movies or listening to generated podcasts, even if they are emotive or informative, it has a follow feeling to it.

You can still have that. Share it with your friends or the whole world, just like this guy did ...

Why would your friends play this instead of one shotting their own version that better matches their preferences?

Well, the price at least in this case. But also, the shared experience presumably matters to more than just them.

Neither AI nor most players are talented game designers, and a future full of games which are mostly half-assed reskins of previous games sounds miserable.

Also, even the most talented game designers enjoy playing games created by others, in no small amount because they make different (and therefore more interesting) choices.

I can imagine a future where LLM generated games would do placement ads within the generated game. May even be hard to remove. So enjoy while it lasts.

Put game ads on the game over screen with a frequency depending on how bad you are at the current game.

[delayed]

I think it's something like FOMO. Even if you're having fun in one game, it's ruined because in the back of your mind you're thinking about the other games you could also be playing and perhaps you'd be having an even better time with them. So obvious answer is obvious - don't think about your other games. Just pick a game, and go crazy with it. Probably some good relationship advice metaphors in there too.

I just mention this because I think what describing something basically 100% of people experience, and it completely ruins gaming for many - or they think it's because they're an adult or whatever. When we were young and had limited access to games, everything was amazing. Then you have a Steam library with 800 hand-picked games, many of which you've never even launched, and you're like 'mehhhh, nothing to play.' It's just FOMO.

Of course this means you'll literally never get through your library for most of us, but what can you do? If our younger selves could only imagine us trying to deal with such brutal problems.

I also kind of became a slave to my mood. With infinite possibilities of games, I could just endlessly scroll, looking for that perfect fit to how I was feeling. Unfortunately, moods can be more nuanced than even an ostensibly endless list of games, so the gaming session just became scrolling instead of playing.

You can't compare enthusiasm you felt at 12 with the one you feel at 36 or 48.

Even if it's exactly the same, for a kid week of fun feels like life formative experience because it is. For adult a week of fun passes almost instantly because time itself is perceived differently. And you are back to baseline which might feel depressive if your baseline is not great.

"Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable."

My gosh this mindset and thought is profoundly toxic.

Humans really hate the idea that their fellow man might be able to get some dignity.

It's not enough that we have enough to live well. We must know that others are suffering!

They're talking about culture stagnating, not food and shelter.

If the good can't make money, you'll be left with the mediocre. That seems to be where we are heading.

This sounds like something people would say about books in the 16th century after the printing press. revolution. How mass production and wide availability of books has led to people not appreciating books anymore.

And yet today, when we have more "great" books than can be read in 10 lifetimes, people still obsess over their favorites and re-read them 10s of times.

Scarcity forces us to search for depth (even where none may exist; case-in-point - people analyzing how hot the Dothraki drink their soup in Game of Thrones) whereas abundance alows us to choose depth

Yep, in hindsight, I think my dissatisfaction with games started when I could get pirates Dreamcast games. Then emulation meant that I had access to a ridiculous choice of games to play.

Hiroshi Yamauchi knew this when the Famicom / nes launched. There's a quote from him somewhere about it. Anyway that's why third party publishers were limited to a few games a year.

I need to find a way to lock down my steam deck to only one game a month.

I avoid this by focusing on one or a handful of games at a time, sometimes for a year or more for games I particularly enjoy.

In addition to avoiding the problems you describe, it's quite cost effective, whether or not I buy games on sale.

> Without scarcity, nothing is really valuable.

Ironically I learned this messing with game memory in the 90's. As soon as I could give my character whatever power-up or combination of power-ups I wanted, the game was only fun for 10 more minutes.

I've ruined so many games with "god mode" hacks that way. Even something like giving the player obscene amounts of currency and continuing the play the game "as normal" afterward slowly killed it.

So, I save that kind of thing for _after_ the 100% mark (or even 90% for some). When I'm done going as far as I plan to go, then I open up the hacks and mods and see what craziness awaits.

The video games analogy goes even further: playing Doom growing up I'd always enable god mode because it was slightly scary, so it was not a super fun game for me despite being such a cultural phenomenon. Similarly, cheating and getting all the answers/saves from a machine robs the satisfaction of the journey. And we're all strapped with cheating machines.