As part of my master’s degree, once a week we have to attend a guest presentation by (a supposed) industry expert. Last semester the lectures were generally boring; The lecturers did not know how to present their topic of choice to someone else¹. Despite that, they were all visibly passionate about what they were telling us, so the few people each class who really connected with the topic at hand got to have a great time.

The new semester started last week, and with it we got our first guest presentation yesterday, led by the CEO of an israeli mobile gaming company. This presentation made everyone watching over zoom want to shove their head into a wall. It felt less like a lesson and more like an investment pitch that he just so happened to be telling a group of students.

The presentation was about how they’re making their entire game with AI, and I am only slightly exaggerating.

We were shown how the following aspects of their games are entirely automated:

• The game’s app store icon
• The game’s art
• The marketing banners
• The marketing videos
• Translation to other languages
• Responding to customers
• What I am pretty sure was a slide of SEO² giberrish that mentions reddit like 8 times for no reason

And from what I know of modern tech companies, I wouldn’t be surprised if even the code itself was entirely automated. It really put me in the mood for some Elton John, gotta tell ya.

Watching this nightmarefest was initially entertaining, as our class’s collective suffering led to everyone abandoning the zoom chat in favor of our whatsapp group, allowing us to voice the more sincere commentary we had about the presentation:³

gay batman???

There’s no way [people actually download games due to AI-generated ads]. It’s dead internet conspiracy, only bots see ads like that and download

“Here’s our ad in korean!” it’s translated to japanese

The industry in the country is worse than I thought

IS THAT TRUMP

i left the zoom and the first thing i did was watch this video [link to a video of Hayao Miyazaki saying AI is horrible]

I’m going to cry into my schnitzel after this presentation, this is depressing as shit

stay mobile agile buzzwords buzzwords

Around an hour and a half in someone asked “is anyone still listening?” and got hit with five instant “no”s. After the presentation I told my friends I was planning to complain to the director of the game design school⁴ to bring us less business-oriented lessons, and they asked I only do it next week so they can come watch the inevitable shitfling.

I sincerely have no idea what the point of us listening to this presentation was. With the previous presentations we atleast had some takeaway, even if they were niche or way below our level of education. What’s the takeaway here? “You can’t get a job, suckers”?? We didn’t get to learn anything other than how much these guys are disconnected from reality that they think telling people who are aspiring to design games that they don’t need to design the games anymore is a good idea. It’s like explaining to an artist how a printer works and expecting them to clap like a circus seal.

I know bringing up 1984 is the most cliche and cheesy comparison you can make to anything, (especially considering I actually found the book to be really boring,) but while watching the presentation there was a passage I couldn’t get out of my head. There’s a section where the book’s protagonist goes to work and we get to see what sectors of government there are in this dystopia. One of them was a sector who’s job was to create books. Not write books, create them.

She ‘didn’t much care for reading,’ she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I felt like I was watching an equivalent of that, but for games. I was being shown, in painstaking detail, how they make the Chum Bucket’s patty.