I don't think AI will ever really solve "making a fun game" because:

1. Games are highly complex systems, so for example adding a fun mechanic from one game to another game can actually make that game less fun, and AI has no way to know, you just have to playtest it.

2. Games are evergreen (people still play and love the original Zelda/Mario/Tetris) and social (you want to share your love of game XYZ with others), so there's literally no reason for anyone to play a purely derivative game, when you can just play the original.

Eventually AI will be able to make perfect assets and all the other stuff AROUND making a fun game, but the game design will always be a human thing. At best, AI will come up with a bunch of game design experiments that a human will need to playtest and provide feedback on.

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TomGarden an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You may be right, at the same time a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly, and I'm not confident what's fun about existing games cannot be codified and shown statistically somehow. Some genres seem more accessible to AI than others

	▲	CuriouslyC 28 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's hard to say for sure, I think we can at least confidently assert that games are going to be more challenging than other forms of creative expression like Books, Music, Art, etc because people's tolerance for derivative games is lower than their tolerance for derivative movies/music.
	▲	jpalawaga 28 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		i think the difference here is that humans can't even write down what makes a great game great. we don't know. you have to play it. if we can't even write it down, how is an llm going to be able to ace it?
	▲	s0ss 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't think anyone, given better alternatives, would choose games like these. There's a reason low effort output of LLMs has been dubbed Slop... Slop isn't fun or interesting to consume.

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icantevenhold an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s fine though?

I’m having a lot of fun creating an “improved” clone of a very old school game I loved.

It takes lots of back and forth but there is definitely (for me at least) to play this derivative game since it adds a lot of levels and stuff that weren’t available in the original.

Without AI I wouldn’t be able to do anything; but with it it can make some changes, I test them and we iterate on it.

So for me AI solves “making a fun game”. It doesn’t “one shot GTA7” if that is your goal but that also sounds boring

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CuriouslyC an hour ago | parent | next [-]

You misunderstand me, AI solves the "making" part, but not the "fun" part, which is 100% you.

	▲	Culonavirus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yea not the "making" part even (at least not yet). Every single demo/sample of a vibecoded* game thing is a piss poor "counter strike clone" or "gta clone" type of app that has bare bones everything (and i mean PS2 level or worse) and plays like absolute ass down to the basics of character control ans basic gameplay mechanics. *: I don't consider a project you built with an LLM to be "vibecoded" if all the important ideas are from your head, you know what the code is supposed to be doing (domain model is in your head) and you guided the project every step of the way. Otherwise we're all vibecode. So yea, I don't doubt you can create amazing games with AI, but "with" as in "together", not as in "Claude, build me a Minecraft clone, make it fun, no mistakes."

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monknomo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

this is probably a personal problem, but sometimes I get turned around on 'fun making a game' vs 'making a fun game' and I have the idea that ai elides this distinction even further