Even the most popular games (with few exceptions) present as relatively dumb terminals that need constant connectivity to sync every activity to a mainframe - not necessarily because it's an MMO or multiplayer game, but because it's the industry standard way to ensure fairness. And by fairness, of course, I mean the optimization of enforcing "grindiness" as a mechanism to sell lootboxes and premium subscriptions.

And AI just further normalizes the need for connectivity; cloud models are likely to improve faster than local models, for both technical and business reasons. They've got the premium-subscriptions model down. I shudder to think what happens when OpenAI begins hiring/subsuming-the-knowledge-of "revenue optimization analysts" from the AAA gaming world as a way to boost revenue.

But hey, at least you still need humans, at some level, if your paperclip optimizer is told to find ways to get humans to spend money on "a sense of pride and accomplishment." [0]

We do not live in a utopia.

[0] https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/503152-mo... - https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

I imagine there are plenty of indie single-player games that work just fine offline. You lose cloud saves and achievements, but everything else still works.