BioShock Creator Thinks We Still Don’t Really Know “What Games Are” After 50 Years

Veteran game developer Ken Levine has shared his thoughts on generative AI, his latest game and it having high stakes, and why he believes we still don’t really know what video games are.

Talking to GI.biz, Levine said he believes generative AI is a “very powerful” tool that he doesn’t want to underestimate. But he said it has many limitations in its current state, including persistence.

“You look at Sora, the ChatGPT video generator, you see a woman walking down the street and the street scene is beautiful–but if she were to turn around and walk backwards, it wouldn’t remember where she has been,” he said. “It doesn’t currently understand persistence, although that may change.”

Many are concerned about AI taking jobs from humans, and video game executive Andrew Wilson of EA believes that will happen, but Levine said AI still has a ways to go as it relates to creative storytelling.

“So for all the concerns about AI, have you seen it write a good 20-page movie yet? Scene-to-scene? It doesn’t know how to do that,” he said.

For now, the useful parts of AI for game development are focused more on technical elements, Levine said. “For instance, training your bug database to query how many bugs you have in certain situations. But what it can’t do is tell me a really compelling story that has a three-act structure, or even tell me multiple scenes. It gets extremely confused,” he said.

Levine said no generative AI was used in the development of his newest game, Judas, outside of advancements to bug databases.

“Right now I’m not overly impressed when it comes to game development. I’m sure there will be more to it [in future] but I’m not super worried about it yet in a, ‘It’s coming to take everybody’s jobs’ perspective,” he said.

Also in the interview, Levine discussed how the story in Judas has incredibly high stakes.

“We’ve actually never made a game before really where the stakes were this high and that’s for a specific reason,” he said. “This is the problem with Marvel movies: every f**king five minutes, the universe is about to end and eventually that stake can become sort of meaningless. I prefer to avoid that because a player will feel rushed–you want to keep the stakes dramatically high, but you also want to make them feel like they can do what they want to do and explore the environment down to every square inch.”

He added that the story and scope of Judas was “much smaller” when development began, but it grew as the team’s ambitions grew. Judas has been in the works for more than a half-decade, and Levine said one of the reasons for the lengthy development period came down to its setup in being a game that’s responsive to player choices.

“That’s a really hard problem, and that’s why you don’t see a ton of it [in games],” he said.

Levine also spent time during the interview talking about how he believes that video game developers are still trying to find out what a video game is and can be.

“Our industry is over 50 years old and we still don’t really know what it is, what games are. By the time movies were 50 years old, they were making Citizen Kane. It’s changed somewhat [since then], styles have changed, but they had it pretty well figured out by the 1940s–we haven’t,” he said.

Judas is in development for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, though a release date has not yet been announced. For lots more, check out GameSpot’s video feature above that explains what Judas, a narrative-focused FPS, is all about.