EA’s user generated game content demo with AI shows a world of cardboard

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What you need to know

During its Investor Day 2024 presentation, publisher Electronic Arts shared a concept video called “Imagination to Creation.”
In the video, two players built a game experience with AI tools by describing the world they wanted, quickly building a maze of cardboard and two characters with guns.
The players then expanded the world while they were exploring it.

It’s a day ending in y, which means another big company wants to take advance of AI.

The latest contender is publisher Electronic Arts (EA), with a demonstration of how the company is considering AI for the future during its Investor Day 2024 talk.

During the presentation, EA CEO Andrew Wilson noted that AI is at the “very core of our business,” with the technology being centered around the efficiency, expansion, and transformation of EA’s games. EA also showed a concept video titled “Imagination to Creation,” giving an example of how AI tools could be used for user-generated content.

In the video, two players craft a game using simple instructions, generating a world made of cardboard boxes, selecting two characters with guns, and expanding the world while it’s being played in. You can watch the demonstration below, as recorded by Geoff Keighley, host of the Game Awards, Summer Game Fest, and Opening Night Live at Gamescom.

“Make it more epic.”⁰EA Chief Strategy officer Mihir Vaidya demonstrates how EA plans to super-charge user-created game content with AI in this concept video “Imagination to Creation” from EA’s Investor Day event in NYC today. pic.twitter.com/sgBnawF7rKSeptember 17, 2024

Comments on the video have not been enthused, with X (Twitter) users expressing their annoyance and distrust of the concept.

Elsewhere during EA’s Investor Day 2024, the company outlined how the next Battlefield game is being built by four studios, sharing the role that each team plays in the upcoming first-person shooter.

Analysis: This isn’t impressive, but why is that?

Before I tear into this, I want to be completely fair. This demonstration is a concept video pitched toward investors. EA is outlining why people with money should continue to give them money, not demonstrating why players or developers should be excited.

With that in mind, it’s hard for me to overstate how utterly droll this is. Assuming for a moment that the technology can work this way without hiccups, why exactly would people use it? To create mazes of cardboard? This isn’t interesting. At all. This is a concept that would’ve been found boring hours after players built it in Halo 3’s Forge mode, but at least there, the level design would have a human touch.

EA admits that this concept would pull from the company’s library of proprietary assets, and indeed, the video shows the players mulling over characters from Plants vs. Zombies and Apex Legends. Now, perhaps things get more interesting there if we mull possibilities (whose inner teen doesn’t want to see Mass Effect and Dragon Age characters unleashed in the same room like a late-night AO3 read?) but at the end of the day, it’s all only possible thanks to what talented developers will have built and toiled over.

I do firmly believe user generated content has an interesting place in the gaming industry, and we’ve seen talented modders get hired by studios or start their own companies. Just recently, I built my own tiny platformer in Unity, just to understand game design a bit more. I love the idea of making it a simpler process, but nothing shown today tells me AI has us any closer in a meaningful way.

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