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Okay time to do the thing where I tweet about something and then chost about it more. Obviously, this clip stuck in my head a bit and it made me think about game designs and games people make and why a lot of early games people make tend to be lacking.

A big thing is, a person decides they want to a game so they get unity or unreal. Oh they have physics, lets make, I don't know, a marble game. Lets use the stock menu API. Lets get free assets from the asset store. Lets find royalty free sound effects...

None of these things are bad on their own, and if this is your first game or you don't care, none of these are bad at all. But when you're led in your design decisions to follow a lack of friction, you don't make what you want to make, you make what the tools want you to make. Then no one responds to it, because there is none of you in it. No ideas, none of your taste... just a collection of things. Not even a collage. No higher purpose. No nothing.

And as a learning experience, this is great. Almost all of us who have made games have made something vapid... and a lot of these free assets or tricks, or whatever? You keep using them. Not every part of your game can afford to be an uphill struggle. But some part of it, the heart of it, has to not be defined by the path of least resistance, but your will. The question, for making meaningful art in general isn't what's easy, or what are you good at... The question is... What do you want? What you want might still be easy, but you can't want it because it's easy. You have to just want it.

And you see this with asset flip games. People don't have an idea about how they'd make a zombie game. They just... want to have made a zombie game. They buy assets, and assemble them into a zombie game like shape. No will, no direction, no opinions. Just the distilled essence of what already has been, not even dripping with your love and adoration for the source material.

In some sense that's fine, but when you want people to care about what you made, it's not fine. This is what Foddy said. This is the trash. The food in the sink. The pile of spent, used up hubris. A mountain of garbage.

Then we have AI. Honestly, removed from capitalism induced ethical problems, I think AI generation is, in theory, a good thing. They fill the same roles of cheap assets, royalty free music, whatever. You can be creative with AI art. You can make real art with the pieces of AI Art. Now, AI Art isn't concerned with elevating poor creators who can't afford to 'just hire people', it's for the rich to get richer, squeezing more value out of us, but lets ignore that for now.

The reason every AI project, every AI piece of art, everything feels hollow is it was made out of the food in the sink. Spent, unoriginal content, rehashed, given to you because it was the easiest, most sensible thing to give you. Can you wrangle it to give you good results. Sure. People can, people have, people will again... but who does this appeal to? The same people who want to make asset flips. The same people who just want to have 'made a zombie game'. Nothing to say, no deeper desires. They want the path of least resistance, and AI is a tool that is practically, by the shear law of averages, is designed to give you that path. To get anything worthwhile out of AI, you need to truly want something, and immediately, art becomes a struggle again.

AI is a trash machine. The works it creates are, with few exceptions, 'spent' before they are even made. Garbage in, garbage out.

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