I Played the AI Version of Quake II and This Is How It Went
AI tools are suddenly everywhere, and you’ve probably tried using an AI program to generate text and images , or maybe even audio and video . But AI isn’t just for media you passively interact with: companies are also embracing interactive entertainment, including video games.
We’ve seen examples of this over the last year or so. Google’s Genie model , for example, aims to create video game play environments based on user prompts. Earlier this year, Microsoft introduced a similar artificial intelligence model called Muse , and now the first mainstream experience of this model is here: the company is offering an experimental version of Quake II , a game originally released in 1997 that relies on artificial intelligence.
I’ve now played the AI version of Quake , and it’s… strange, to say the least. It feels like you’re playing a video game in your sleep. Not because it is good, but because everything about it seems unstable and ephemeral. Other than purely for novelty reasons, I’m really not sure why this thing exists.
What’s it like to play AI Quake?
When you first download the Copilot Gaming Experience, you agree to a pop-up warning that the game is rated M and that you are, in fact, 18 years of age or older, although M-rated games must be 17 or older. Consider this your first warning that something is wrong.
The game loads in a small window in the center of the screen. It is immediately clear that this is not entirely true. Of course, it’s a recognizable video game: first-person view, with an animated hand holding a gun in the lower right corner. You have a health bar, an ammo counter, and a weapon indicator. You may recognize that you are in a room with well-defined (but blocky) features. However, something about it all seems off, and the effect gets worse as soon as you press the button.
There is a delay of a full second between pressing a key on the keyboard and the action happening on the screen. Lag is one thing, but it’s not everything: when you move , the environment changes subtly, as if nothing around you is actually stable. For example, there are no enemies when you first start, but they may appear as you move around the room. They don’t appear without any animation or care – you move the frame and suddenly an enemy appears. (More on this instability in a moment.)
The game is a bit like SuperHot : when you stop moving, nothing happens. Enemies don’t attack, but actually just freeze. It’s only when you perform an action that you’ll notice something on the screen change: the monster may move, change shape (thanks to AI rather than Quake gameplay mechanics) or attack, or perhaps the room itself will change completely. You can look at the floor, spin around in a circle two or three times, then look up and find yourself in another corner of the map.
The game tries to stay consistent. You always start in the same room, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to maintain the integrity of the map while moving between areas – hopefully without getting shot at by a newly created blurry enemy. But as you move and look around, you can almost feel the ground beneath you shifting, as if the game world could turn into something else at any moment. This is truly what gives the feeling of sleep.
Things are falling apart
Sometimes you run into a room and encounter an enemy who is shooting. But if you run past him and then turn around, he will no longer be there. You don’t even need him to get out of sight: by simply firing left to right to “dodge” his attacks, I saw one enemy “fall apart” to the floor, as if I had used the moving ground to obliterate the monster.
You don’t have that problem because it is impossible to die. When you are attacked, your health meter decreases at a reasonable rate. However, you will notice that the numbers begin to change randomly. Even if your health reaches zero, your character will not crash and you will not see the “Game Over” screen. The meter will just bounce around single digits until you take damage forever or until you kill a monster (or let the AI decide it’s time to disappear from the character entirely).
Game breaking bugs
The game can simply crash at any moment. During one of my runs, I was about to enter a hallway, decided to take a 360 degree look at the room beforehand, and when I did it all the way, the hallway turned into an elevator. When I approached the elevator button, I brought up a loading screen that never completed loading.
Another time I looked down, turned around and looked up again and found myself in a completely different room. As I walked around, my health suddenly began to drop, but there was no sign of my attacker—at least I didn’t see one. Just as I was about to shoot around the room at random, the game stopped and never resumed, like with the elevator. If the game doesn’t freeze on its own, the site will time out, forcing you to start a new game if you want to continue playing.
Should video games be fun?
At the heart of the game is Microsoft’s WHAM model, which the company says was trained on human gameplay data to guess what should be displayed frame-by-frame, as well as what the player can control next. In its research paper, Microsoft enthusiastically explains what’s so great about an artificial intelligence model that can create video game environments.
I’m not sure I agree. First of all, the Quake experience is not fun . There is no goal or objective here other than to see how long you can last without ruining the experience. Sure, you can kill your enemies, but they can’t kill you. In fact, the AI generation can get to the enemy before they get to you if you simply move in the wrong direction.
I’m sure Microsoft will come out with a better version of this experience over time. There might be more consistency as you move around the map; perhaps the enemies will actually hold their ground and be able to put an end to your game. But even if we get to the point where the AI delivers a completely in-game experience, why would we want that? Who wants to efficiently press a randomizer button and play whatever mixture of real video games a computer program comes up with for us?
This doesn’t mean there aren’t potential practical applications of AI in game development, but we should view them as tools that can be added to a game developer’s workflow, rather than something that makes that developer obsolete. However, if this is the current state of AI-generated video games, then flesh-and-blood game developers probably aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.