InXile Entertainment’s next game is the first-person steampunk RPG Clockwork Revolution. Studio founder Brian Fargo, who’s leading the project, recently sat down with YouTuber MrMattyPlays for a deep-dive interview about his long career and his take on current hot topics in the video game industry like generative AI and LLM technology, which the Xbox studio’s parent company is currently investing $80 billion in. Has InXile embraced it in a similar fashion? “For certain things, but but I’m very keen to what are the ethical uses of it?” he said. “I am worried about job loss.”
Fargo, whose career in games dates back to the 1980s when he worked on influential role-playing games like The Bard’s Tale and Wasteland, laid out a couple of different use cases he foresees for tools like ChatGPT, but distinguished them from things like using generative AI to plagiarize the creative output of other artists. “These games…we’re close to about the same word count as the Bible, basically, and so that’s a lot of data no human can get in in its head,” he said. “So would I like an LLM to be able to query: ‘How many times did [inaudible] talk?’ ‘How many times have we used this skill?’ Like there’s some things that I would want to query the information to make sure so I see that.”
The veteran studio head said he also uses generative AI for inspiration they way he might visit a museum or scroll through people’s Deviant Art pages, but that only commissioned work is used in the actual production process. Other uses Fargo pointed to were cleaning up motion capture footage and potentially voicing quick pickup lines added to a game at the last minute if the actor agrees to it and is paid extra but is otherwise unable to make it into the studio. That part sounds in line with what SAG-AFTRA members settled on in a new contract after months on strike.
“Can we use it for, like, mundane tasks that nobody wants to do so the human creativity can soar?” Fargo said. “Well, I think that’s kind of cool. I don’t think anybody wants to do some of these things. Do we really want humans going through checking for punctuation? You know, I mean, I don’t have it doing it right now, but that would seem like I’d rather have those same people going, ‘I have a great idea to to make this scene far better.’ Like that, I’d rather have the minds thinking about the good stuff.”
