I generally look forward to these little demo fests. While it’s never exactly been a flood of mind blowing games, I usually find a handful of upcoming games that stand out and show some promise. This time around, though, I’m left dispirited by all the slop flooding the lists. Generated slop. Asset-flip slop. The few games that aren’t I only find after wading through pages upon pages of rubbish, and then it’s a crapshoot on if it seems worth downloading. I eventually gave up and don’t have much interest in trying again.

I’ve long been a fan and supporter of the indie scene, understanding that the diamonds that make it worth it take effort to find. But if this is what we have to look forward to, I’m concerned how it’ll fare as the requisite effort to sift through the dregs grows exponentially. Eventually it’s just too much.

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    8·
    19 hours ago

    They have to disclose that Ai was used. So you should be able to filter them out. At least in theory. This should be a general setting in https://store.steampowered.com/account/preferences/ . Maybe you could exclude some titles by tags, but I would be careful to not exclude normal and good games by accident. Maybe there is a Steam Curator for this job (does anyone else use the Steam Curators?).

    As for the Next Fest itself, my internet is extremely bad since 2 months. I have no clue what’s on it right now… :-(

    • kurcatovium@piefed.socialEnglish
      31·
      18 hours ago

      Well, I believe there are ways where AI is helpful in games. Like brute force translation to languages nobody would pay translator for. Or some automation of world. Or maybe populating world with objects. Or modeling character visuals. But why would anyone want game with story, gameplay loop or quests made by AI? Or AI made lore? Dafuq is that?!

      • pop [he/him]@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        17 hours ago

        Or AI made lore? Dafuq is that?!

        I’ve seen a few videos of that, and it’s generally lauded by people who have no grasp of storytelling. They think lore is a synonym of story, rather than the “decoration” of a story. It reeks of laziness.

        • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
          4·
          17 hours ago

          Only people suffering from Dunning Kruger effect think “AI” is competent.

          Interesting how much power morons have.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        2·
        18 hours ago

        I also not entirely against Ai, if its ethically correct and used wisely without slop. I am looking forward for 2 major improvements in the future:

          1. not important throw away NPCs in RPGs with some (local) Ai support when talking to them, this is already explored, and
          1. multiplayer enemies with advanced Ai acting exactly like humans, with a human vision, reaction and thinking, this would make mulitplayer games possible to play offline without servers, and I even envision that we can download “training” data of other players such as friends or professional celebrities

        Not to mention (as you mentioned already) for development. The problem is, the current industry uses Ai reckless, producing slop, and using stolen training data. Also agreed, please don’t create games their story, main plot and gameplay entirely by Ai…

        • MotoAsh@piefed.socialEnglish
          3·
          17 hours ago

          But no AI models are ethical because they’ve all been trained on material that they did not have the rights to… Ok ok, I’m sure some niche models have been, but literally none of the major corpo products that are most likely to be used were.