Creating Video Games with AI: A Mario Example

Artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be able to do everything these days. Take pictures, make videos, and replace most of us with real human authors if you believe the hype. Maybe it's all over! And yet we persist in writing about another job that AI has taken over: video game development.

The research paper is titled “Video Game Generation: A Practical Study with Mario.“The basic idea is whether a generative AI model can create an interactive video game by first training it on an existing game.

MarioVGG, as it is called, is a “text-to-video model”. It didn't build that Mario Game you are familiar with. It takes player commands as text input – such as “run” or “jump” – and then outputs video images showing the result in the “game”. The model was trained on a frame-by-frame dataset Super Mario Brothers Game play combined with data about user input at that time. The model demonstrates the ability to generate believable video output for given player inputs, including basic game physics, element interactions and collisions. This is able to do this in a chained manner, allowing to somewhat simulate a player taking multiple actions and moving through a level of the game.

It's not like playing a real one Mario Still playing, definitely. Regardless, the AI ​​model has demonstrated the ability to recreate the game's world in a way that behaves relatively consistently with the established rules. However, if you're in the video game development space, you probably don't have much to worry about yet – you're probably already past basic game development Mario Clones years ago, so you have quite an advantage for now!