Afterwards, we dined at a restaurant at the top of a nearby hill, with spectacular views and a keen wind. The restaurant-owners are aware that most visitors will get cold, so provide said wimps with towels to wrap themselves up in, nice and snug. As a Yorkshireman, I was, of course, impervious to this minor lowering of temperture. It was a little ironic that we were told to dress up warm for the previous day's trip to a cave that was like an oven inside, but not tipped off that yesterday we'd be dining on a bare mountain.
This was a great setting for the conference, but as far as I'm concerned that's more of an extrinsic reward. I don't bunk off at the start of an academic year to go to a pretty Spanish village where the daytime temperature never falls below 20°C. I do it because of the people I'll meet and the conversations I'll have. These were, as always for the GESE, very interesting.
Yesterday's topic was AI and games. Almost everyone present (50+ people) had experimented with it for their business, and most were already using it. Anyone wondering whether AI usage will take off in the games industry is already too late — it has. If tasks that took four hours without AI taake 12 seconds with it, you can see the attaction.
If you're worried about dystopian claims that AI will cost jobs, you're right to be worried. Companies need a lot of data to be able to do this, but if they have it (which MMORPG developers do) then they can rent some processors in the cloud to train a model on that data and sack half the company's employees. One company has done this. Then, they can add management data to the same model and use it to run the whole business. The same company is in the process of doing this. The end result is that at the end of next year, the other half of their employees will have been made redundant. Players will benefit because the overheads are so low that prices can come down and old good-but-unprofitaable intellectual properties can be resurrected and operated for a smaller player base.
The view for the medium term is that small, creative teams will emerge that can use AI to create games swiftly. Discoverabiity will be a problem, but if a "rock star" mentality among players develops then they'll follow the small teams, know their members' names and personalities, and communities will develop around them.
Long-term, you'll be able to fill in a form saying what kind of game you want and thirty seconds later by playing one that's been AI-generated to meet your unique specifications.
The games industry is undergoing a correction after over-expansion when everyone was playing during lockdown. This is coinciding with a step change in technology, which is causing a great deal of disruption. It's both exciting and scary at the same time.
This was a great summit. I'll be going to the next one even if I've retired.
Here's that spectacular view I mentoned.
