Researchers have produced a generative AI tool they say can create a three-dimensional game world to help developers design and tweak gameplay.
A paper in Nature said a research team from Microsoft was able to demonstrate the model generating complex 3D video game sequences that were consistent with the training game’s specific mechanics, but with diverse designs. It also allowed developers to tweak the output iteratively.
The World and Human Action Model (WHAM) was developed by Katja Hofmann, Microsoft senior principal research manager, and colleagues who started out interviewing 27 video game developers about their creative needs.
The model was trained on around seven years of human gameplay from Bleeding Edge, a multiplayer online battle arena game developed by Ninja Theory and published by Microsoft’s Xbox Game Studios.
The paper said the model could “generate consistent and diverse gameplay sequences and persist user modifications.”
“In contrast to previous approaches to creativity support tools that required manually defining or extracting structure for relatively narrow domains, generative AI models can learn relevant structure from available data, opening the potential for a much broader range of applications,” it said.
The team also produced WHAM Demonstrator as a visual interface to allow developers to engage with and customize the outputs of WHAM. It can be found at Hugging Face, along with WHAM’s weights and evaluation dataset.
“The key novelty that generative AI models such as WHAM contribute is that they remove the need for handcrafting or learning domain-specific models for individual domains, making it likely that model innovations such as these will broaden creativity support to other domains, such as music59 or video60,” the researchers said. “Extrapolating from our use case focusing on a single 3D video game, we can also get a first sense of how powerful future models will be in allowing teams of human creators to craft complex new experiences.”
In the meantime, there has been a kickback against the use of generative AI in game development.
Indie developer Polygon Treehouse, which produced Röki and Mythwrecked, has proposed a “No Gen AI” seal for games. “The issue is that these generative technologies are trained on existing works by human artists who have not given their permission, or been compensated, for their work being utilized,” the company said. ®
