I do not like DC Universe Online. I made a joke out of this in yesterday’s Perfect Ten, but it was all true statements. Nearly every single element of that game I point to is, in one way or another, bad. The part of it that I come the closest to liking (I am a fan of comic books and DC heroes) actually exacerbates the part I don’t like (it is a very bad example of both), and so it’s all a gigantic mess. This is a bad game. Game bad. I dislike this game.

However, you know what I will say? DCUO is an infinitely better game than absolutely any game that is built primarily from generative AI. I used it as the introduction because I do, in fact, dislike the game, but I think it’s useful in understanding this within the context of how garbage generative AI actually is for its supposed purpose. But a lot of people kinda miss the mark on why that system can’t make good video games. Not “currently can’t,” but can’t, ever, full stop. Which means that we get to discuss intent, starting with a question: Why did I start this column talking about a game I don’t like?

Now, I just said that I used it because I do genuinely dislike the game, but that doesn’t necessarily explain why I felt the need to start by highlighting a game I dislike. You can guess why I did it. Maybe I did it because I wanted to shine a light on the fact that I can dislike a game but still see it as a better product than something theoretically worse. Maybe I did it as a roundabout defense of the game. Maybe I lost a bet!

The actual answer to that question doesn’t matter, though, because the real substance of the answer is in the fact that there is an answer. Even if you don’t care about the answer, you know that I did that with intent. There was a reason behind my choosing that example and this lead-in to the column. I am doing this with a will and reason. There is a purpose, a meaning, a goal in what I am doing.

Generative AI does not have this because it literally cannot.

You could argue that hey, generative AI is fed prompts by humans who have motives, so how does that make a difference? And the answer is that, again, artists also have motives. Why do the drakes in World of Warcraft have pineapple knobs at the end of their tails? I don’t know. I do not know the modeler who designed that, and even if I could find out, I do not know if he or she would even be able to explain to me, “Oh, I added this because of X.”

Maybe it’s because the modeler was a big fan of dinosaurs like Ankylosaurus and wanted to add some of that design. It would make sense! But again, I am confident there was a reason. And you know what? It makes WoW’s drakes look unique. It is one of many elements that you can look at and immediately recognize that this is part of a specific world with a specific art style. People designed this with a goal.

Generative AI does not have this. It does not have intent. It does not open a paragraph in a certain way to spark an emotional reaction; it opens paragraphs off in a way that its algorithms determine are the most common and appropriate ways to open paragraphs. It produces a perfect Median Paragraph that might, in fact, communicate accurate facts, but it might just produce complete garbage punctuated with actual lies and fabrications. But even if you can fix the garbage problem, you cannot fix the lack of intent.

Art is about intent.

That isn’t to say that intent matters more than results; quite the opposite. But intent is why we look for meaning in art. The part of the old “infinite monkeys typing Shakespeare” bit that people tend to forget is that it’s often brought up as a question of meaning. If a monkey accidentally managed to type out the works of Shakespeare, would they mean anything? Obviously not. The monkey wasn’t trying to do that. These words don’t mean anything to the monkey.

We look at how to draw meaning out of art because we know meaning went into it in the first place. Again, I think DCUO is a bad game, but I think that because a bunch of human beings got together and brainstormed and had hours of meetings about how the game should look and play. A bunch of people got together and discussed things like “how do we make players feel like they occupy the same world as Superman?” and they came up with answers, then they worked hard on making them realities, and then they released the game for everyone in the world to play.

Do I agree with those decisions? Virtually none of them. But I know they were made.

Generative AI has material problems in terms of execution, sure, but even if you can fix things like “that is not how hands work,” you can’t fix the lack of intent. You cannot make a game with generative AI because generative AI cannot think of things like “what if you rolled a ball across a landscape and as it got bigger you could pick up more and more ridiculous things.” It couldn’t come up with WoW because it would come up with the next game in the franchise as being Warcraft 4, and it couldn’t make a good version of that because it wouldn’t be based on turning ideas on their head like the actual Warcraft 3 was.

We’ll never know everything about ZeniMax’s canceled MMO that was axed by people trying to maximize profits by offloading work to AI, but we know that it was made by people who cared a lot about making a fun game that wasn’t something we had all seen hundreds of times before. Maybe it was great. Maybe it wasn’t very good. But it was made with intent by people who knew conventions and wanted to go off-script, a thing you can’t make a computer algorithm meant to maintain the script generate.

Am I saying that AI has no place in gaming? That’s a loaded question, but it’s also the wrong one. The point here is that generative AI cannot produce a good game. It cannot craft an MMORPG you want to play. There is no meaning to extract because none was put in. And no matter how much you refine the algorithms involved, no matter how detailed the simulation can be, it will never be able to actually make a decision about something it wants because that’s not what the tool is made to do.

Your hammer doesn’t want to do things; it just drives nails into material. You can use it as part of building a house. But it cannot design a house.

And I started off with DCUO as an example because I like it when I call back to prior columns and create a bonus for people who read other things that I write on a regular basis. I know someone would have been really bothered if I never answered that question.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.