John Riccitiello Discusses AI and the Future of Video Game Software with an Insider
During his career spanning over 20 years, starting from his tenure as the head of Electronic Arts in 1997, John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity, a video game software company, has witnessed the transformation and changes in the video game industry.
Unity Software Inc. was founded in Denmark and is now based in San Francisco. It’s partnering with Apple to help bring games to its upcoming virtual reality headset, the Vision Pro. Riccitiello recently spoke with The Associated Press about how artificial intelligence is changing the way video games are created and played.
Associated Press: What are the biggest trends in gaming?
Riccitiello: I think AI is going to change the game of pairs quite profoundly. One of them is that it makes games faster, cheaper and better. It’s already happening. I mean, you can already use AI for digital people and editing environments and all kinds of things that make it faster. It is also possible to realize experiences that were never possible before.
Q: Can you give examples?
Riccitiello: You know “Call of Duty,” you know “Grand Theft Auto,” and you know “Candy Crush.” Every one of these games, every thing you see in it and every line of dialogue, every environment, every lighting effect is coded by someone expecting you to use it. So the perimeter of the game is the content that is put on the DVD or downloaded from the Internet. There is no more. It is what it is. They can increase it over time by patching games and adding levels. “Candy Crush” is delivered about 50 and now it’s what?
A: 10,000 I think.
Riccitiello: So they keep adding to it. But each of them is a subdued experience. So I was involved in the release of “The Sims” in 2000, and it was a great game. And you know how they used “Simlish”, right? Did you know why? Because there are so many things you can do in “The Sims,” it’s like an insane amount of interactions you can have because you create the characters yourself. These characters interact with each other. No writer could ever write all the appropriate dialogue for it. It would be as big as the Library of Congress when you’re done.
Q: I think I know where you’re going with this.
A: You know where I’m going, I’m sure. The same way GPT 4 works. you can set the parameters. The player could do this or the game studio could do that. A game studio could let the player describe this character or their motivations the same way you type in prompts to get the dialogue back. And they could do this to all their characters beforehand. And AI can be born in any language – English, Russian, Japanese, French, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s a breakthrough. It’s really hard to overestimate its importance. It’s alive.
Another example would be one of my favorite games of all time, “Grand Theft Auto”. And a lot of people like “Red Dead (Redemption)” because they’re such brilliant, realized worlds. Sam and Dan Houser, the guys who created it at Take-Two Rockstar Games, are the most powerful creators in history. But, again, every shoplifting, everything in the game was something they thought was possible. Now what you can do is you can create that world and you can basically create a bunch of things like “this is a shop”, “this is criminal or not criminal”, or the player can say “it’s criminal”. And then anything you can imagine, any interaction between the shop and criminals is possible, including getting a job there – I mean anything can be possible.
Q: But according to the instructions?
A: You wouldn’t need to have instructions, but it would just look like a complete mess if you didn’t have something. Some of these guardrails allow for creativity.
Q: What do you think about the metaverse?
A: I always thought the word was loaded and silly. I gave a speech a couple of years ago and said that I forbade the people at Unity from using it because I thought it was overused and thrown away with the garbage. That people used and abused it for their own purposes.
But then I defined the metaverse as something very different than most people.
Q: How do you define it?
A: I said it’s the next version of the Internet. It’s 3D rather than 2D. It’s continuous rather than not, it’s real-time rather than not. And often it’s about many other things. And then I tried to explain what it wasn’t. It wasn’t about avatars, it wasn’t about XR. It certainly wasn’t about half-embodied avatars (which were built for Meta’s Unity, by the way). I was very happy that they built it and paid us, I just didn’t think that was it.
We have customers like Hyundai building the factory of the future where all the robots and humans are interacting in this big environment and controlling it. And the people working in the factory do their jobs on iPhones.
It’s not going to be one universal 3D world. I think it’s more likely to be a set of very immersive experiences. And I think a lot of people pontificate in a way that I don’t buy that “no, no, you’re going to be on Amazon, then walk right into ‘Call of Duty,’ and walk right into the NFL show, and then walk right into chat. And the thing is that it’s really hard to make it work. People say well, what if I want to throw a bomb from “Call of Duty” into a chess set like I’m playing And you have to ask yourself, would you really want to do that the first time you did it?
