I struggle with these world models from the perspective of video games (so this post is a particular perspective).

I'm not a game developer myself, but some of my favorite games carry a deep sense of intentionality. For instance, there is typically not a single item misplaced in a FromSoftware game (or, for instance, Lies of P -- more recently). Almost every object is placed intentionally.

Games which lack this intentionality often feel dead in contrast. You run into experiences which break immersion, or pull you out of the experience that the developer is trying to convey to you.

It's difficult for me to imagine world models getting to a place where this sort of intentionality is captured. The best frontier LLMs fail to do this in writing (all the time), and even in code, and the surface of experiences for those mediums often feel "smaller" than the user interaction profile of a video game.

It's not clear how these world models could be used modularly by humans hoping to develop intentional experiences? I don't know much about their usage (LLMs are somewhat modular: they can produce text, humans can work on it, other LLMs can work on it). Is the same true for the video output here?

All this to say, I'm impressed with these world models, but similar to LLMs with writing, it's not really clear what it is that we are building towards? We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster? Perhaps the most immediate benefit is the ability for robotic systems to simulate actions (by conjuring a world, and imagining the implications).

In general, I have the feeling that we are hurtling towards a world with less intentionality behind all the things we experience. Everything becomes impersonal, more noisy, etc.

>We are able to create less satisfying, less humane experiences faster?

Yes, exactly. Inundate the world with superficially plausible yet hollow content, including any desired themes. People who aren't very discerning won't complain; the others will be outmatched and find that 99/100 pieces are all noise and they will need to spend increasing amounts of time trying to find the 1, if they can.

I think there are some good parallels with Amazon: the broken sorting and manipulated unit pricing, coupled with the avalanche of cheap clones pushes users to give up and just buy one of the top listed products (a featured listing/Amazon-clone). If you do a web search for various products and go to images, Amazon product links often take up 50-90% of the results.

There are two things here, firstly, Without AI, you can have heavily designed environments or you can have procedurally generated, people manage to make both work. Both can also fail because of reasons specific to the approach. Careless procedural generation can produce a poor variety or nonsensical outputs. Careless specific placement can violate any rules that a game has established creating an incoherent experience.

Making a world internally consistent by explicit placement gets harder as you increase in scale. When internal consistency is a factor impacting quality, there is a scale at which generated content eventually becomes the higher quality solution.

Secondly, when generating content with AI, the same rules around carelessness apply. There are certainly generative AI tools out there that offer few options when it comes to composing what you want, that is not a necessary part of AI, some of it is because people are wanting rudimentary interfaces, some of it is that the generators are sufficiently new that the control mechanisms are limited because they are focused upon doing something at all before doing it highly controlled, in some ways the problem is that things are new enough that it can be hard to describe what is desirable controllability, making the generator to see what people would like it to be able to do is, I think, a reasonable path to follow prior to creating the control that people want. Part of it is also that there _are_ tools that give a high level of control over what is generated but far fewer people get to see them. There are ways to control styles, object placement, camera motions, scene compositions, etc. The more specialised you get, the smaller the subset of people who need that specific control.

I think AI can make things possible for people who could not have done so without them, but it's still going to take care to make something special.

I think your comment can be split into two questions: 1. Games derive some appeal from their intentionality and hand-crafted nature. Will these less-intentional experiences be as appealing? 2. Can these less-intentional tools still be used to create intentional designs?

On that first point I think it's important to remember that the lineage of video games comes from board & card games and sports. There's always been an ability to inject more complexity and less-intentionality into those things. Sports in some ways are like a simplified and altered role-play of war battles, and more realistic war roleplaying does exist but it has less appeal.

As humans we like solving things and noticing patterns and the intentionality of games taps into that appeal.

On the latter point I do think these world models will eventually be used to meaningfully contribute to building games. I think people will have to find new ways to design that balances intentionality against the freeform nature of these simulations, but it may take a while to have the capability to do so.

One thing is robotics. Both for training robotics AI, and to let robots test hypothetical actions before comitting to them. I don't think world models are stable enough for either yet

The other is creating multi-modal models with a better understanding of our world. LLMs often fail at incredibly basic spatial reasoning ("someone left a package in front of your apartment, describe going there", or the "should I drive to the car wash or go there", etc). World models excel at these kinds of things (in theory). They develop a great understanding of physical spaces, object interactions, etc. They can simulate fluids, rigid body physics etc. You "just" have to get really good at making world models, then somehow marry them with an LLM in a way that ensures the LLM can benefit from the world model's training data. Nobody has managed to really do that yet

So lots of hopes for the future. Until then they get commercialized as video models, or ways to experience your favorite forest, or to have a really bad video game ... whatever can be sold on a short time horizon to finance the actual goals

What does intentionality mean in the context of a world model generated game-world? I guess true human intention would have been throw out the window already at that point.

One aspect of intentionality is that there’ll be a narrative payoff when you find something you find interesting. In videogames, the world is mostly pre-designed, so the designer has to predict what you’ll be interested in for the most part (In pen and paper RPGs, this is usually done better, because the human dungeon master/DM can plan ahead, but also improvise a payoff or modify the plot between sessions). If there was a world model generated game world, I guess the model would have to be “smart” though to setup and execute those payoffs.

An advantage that the world model would have (and shares with a good human DM) is that everything is an interactable, and the players get to pick what they think is interesting. If everything is improv with a loose skeleton around it, you don’t have to predict as far out. I think world model generated games, if they even become a thing, will be quite a bit worse than conventionally designed ones for a long time (improv can be quite shallow!) but have a lot of potential if they work out.

FromSoft is an interesting example. They make the game more believable by having extremely missable quests, just, most of them don’t block progress through the game, and you usually stumble across enough side quests naturally (although IMO the density was too low in Elden Ring, their system showed a bit of weakness in the less-guided context). The plot is pretty vague, but the vibes tell enough of a story that you don’t really mind. It’s sort of improv/pen-and-paper but the player’s imagination is doing the job of the DM.

I'm of a strong believer that AI just isn't (may never will be?) a strong judge and executor of "quality". Quality is a loaded term though. Are there any objectively good game designs? Even if there is, maybe only one game of 10 that use the same 'blue print' every reach critical mass (popularity).

Video games are not the initial motivation at all.

These world models are key for robotic and coherence in video generation.

Give a world model images of a factory, the robot now can simulate tasks and do the best result.

Give a world model images/context etc. and it can generate a coherent world for video generation.

What this world model system might be able to do for us in regards of gaming or virtual reality: Either simulate 'old' environments like the house of your grandparents (gaussian splatting but interactive) or potential new ones like a house, kitchen, remodeling.

It can also be a very interesting easy to approach VR environment were you can start building your world with voice. That would be very intentional. After all world building is not necessarily connected to being able to generate 3d assets. Just because you need to go this route today, doesn't mean you have to do this tomorrow.

> some of my favorite games carry a deep sense of intentionality. For instance, there is typically not a single item misplaced in a FromSoftware game (or, for instance, Lies of P -- more recently). Almost every object is placed intentionally.

That's a pretty specific and one-sided example. There are tons of good games that don't rely on elaborate item placement (e.g. many Bethesda games are great because most items are useless decorations, they broke that rule in recent games, giving the purpose to clutter, and it made them a lot worse). There are tons of good games not relying on this intentionality at all, they're either literally random cool ideas thrown at the wall, or even procedurally generated.

Even though I doubt the main purpose of these models is to produce video games, I have the opposite view from you in that I am excited to see these put to work as components of procedural generation in video games. I don't think that is going to negatively impact story driven games that you seem to enjoy any more than the market for open world and simulation games currently does. They are separate concerns and use distinct techniques.

Where you look for an intentionally evoked experience authored by a game designer, I am looking for an unexplored world unfolding before me filled with emergent and unique phenomena that perhaps no one and not even the game designer has seen before.

> Games which lack this intentionality often feel dead in contrast

Like for instance... Dwarf Fortress? Minecraft?

Generative AI is just another method to go procedural generation. Not necessarily a better way. Or you could even argue that procedural generation is a form of generative AI... But either way, there are games where the lack of intentionality is central to the appeal.

> In general, I have the feeling that we are hurtling towards a world with less intentionality behind all the things we experience. Everything becomes impersonal, more noisy, etc.

You’re right - but that world is not the end of the story. The intentionality matters. Human creations matter because they connect us. I don’t know how long it will take, but people will build judgement as to what makes for good use of these tools to make meaningful things and expand our creative horizons in deeply human ways. Mind you, there will always be shallow slop. It’ll just take time for creators to learn how to use these tools to make something that isn’t slop.

By and large I agree, but it doesn’t need to be either/or.

Many of the most popular games in the past decade are procedurally generated and have nothing “intentionally” placed (apart from tuning/tweaking the balance of the seeding algorithms).

If we use world models to train AI systems, are we not essentially forcing something to live so it can gather data for us?

Yes, we haven't gone that far with creating consciousness yet, but there is gonna be a lot of money around neural computing devices for consumers in the coming decades, so that will speed up knowing what sense data you need for consciousness.

FromSoftware-quality games are <5% of the market. >50% of the market is abominable slop that very well might benefit from AI writing and design.

for example, I am 100% certain that ANY model could write a better Dragon Age sequel than the rotting corpse of Bioware did, because only humans can despise their audience and their source material. an LLM would dutifully attempt to produce more of the thing rather than 're-imagine' the thing for 'the modern audience'.