Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: ID:chuappgame, author: Zhu Siqi

We are still caught in the trap of pragmatism and eagerness for work.

Despite the controversy, it is no longer empty talk that game companies are gradually integrating AI into their workflows. Although the main controversy is still concentrated in the field of ethics and copyright, the debate on other issues has never been absent. For example, will the development of AI, like other technologies, also have competition between countries and regions, so that we have the risk of lagging behind? Not only that, from the current trend, the game industry seems to be beginning to take the lead in the field of AI. The concept of "meta-universe", which was once hotly hyped before, is also considered to be essentially a sandboxie game in which user-generated content (UGC) and AI-generated content (AICG) participate together.

Before that, especially in the relatively mainstream discourse, many people did not expect that AI, a science fiction technology, would be the first to be applied and developed on a large scale in the game field. In other words, the technological change that seems to be taking shape at the moment is driven by an industry purely for entertainment. This is not so easy for many people who are used to "strategically advantageous" or pragmatic narrative.

Fun and value Today, even at home, people must recognize the relationship between games and technology. In the study of "Game Technology-- A New Technology Cluster in the process of Digital-reality Integration" issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in July 2022, the important role of games in the development of science and technology is expounded in great detail. In particular, it is mentioned that the contribution rate of game technology to the technological progress of the chip industry is 14.9%.

In fact, the relationship between games and technology is quite old and much closer than people think. Not long ago, Toule had a conversation with Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent Group. The senior practitioner of a large domestic game manufacturer said that games are the digital cultural products that ordinary users can come into contact with on a daily basis, which means that hardware devices for daily consumption will be the first to respond to the demand from games.

If you want to simply sort out the relationship between games and hardware, the early development can probably be described as "playing games even if the conditions are limited." For example, in 1958, physicists used oscilloscopes to run the game "double tennis". It looked very simple, but people still loved it.

After entering the era of the semiconductor industry, in the 1970s, Atari launched the home console Atari 2600, which uses a general-purpose CPU chip. This console, which can play different games by changing the cassette, quickly became popular and sold tens of millions of units-that is, tens of millions of CPU. The huge size of the game market led the chip industry even more than personal computers at that time.

The success and failure of Atari are both major events in game history. As the game enters the 3D era, players' demand for beautiful pictures not only makes game developers roll up, but also urges hardware manufacturers to change their thinking. Games with larger and larger volume and more and more realistic pictures often have high requirements for computing power, requiring 3D environment and a variety of details. 3D graphics card arises at the historic moment, and the performance is broken through from generation to generation, giving birth to GPU.

Compared with CPU,GPU, it provides massively parallel computing power. The principle of this technology has been illustrated by many people with vivid metaphors. What is easy to understand is that CPU is equivalent to allowing dozens of doctoral students to do a small number of complex advanced mathematical calculations, while GPU is thousands of high school students doing massive addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. On this basis, AI R & D personnel use GPU to run a large number of training models, which can be said to be natural, and this happens to be essential to the development of AI.

From the result, from the game to the graphics card, and then to the AI, the positive correlation is quite obvious. However, when Huang Renxun founded Nvidia with the vision of "using technology to make video games possible" and happily made money for gamers, he probably could not have imagined that graphics cards would play such a direct role in promoting the development of AI today. In fact, the symbiotic relationship among games, players, and hardware manufacturers has been going on for a long time, but on our side, this fact is mostly drowned in the discussion of social values. Until the emergence of high-performance graphics cards in the AI field, and even the momentum to lead the wind of a new era, some people wake up from a dream and want to "catch up" with great fanfare.

In 2021, a 14-second digital stand-in of Huang Renxun, the founder of Nvidia, appeared at Nvidia's press conference to show the power of calculation. even, the trajectory of the concept of AI in the mainstream is similar to that of "meta-universe": a few years ago, the concept of "meta-universe" was all the rage in the world of gaming and the Internet. So much so that the game producers and partners involved in the actual work have no choice but to say, "join if you can't beat it." they have to rack their brains to rely on these new concepts to attract investors or seek policy support. At present, AI has also begun to appear in policy meetings and reports, which has become a new direction of development.

According to media reports, in early May, the Virtual economy and data Science Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and big data key Laboratory of Mining and knowledge Management of the Chinese Academy of Sciences jointly released the "exploring the Road of AI Innovation-Game Technology and artificial Intelligence Innovation Development report". For the first time, the report systematically analyzes the origin, history and future trend of game technology-driven artificial intelligence innovation.

Some of the data are of particular interest to investors and those looking to catch up with the new tuyere. According to the estimation of the cooperative team of the research group, for every 1% increase in the size of the game industry, the combined operating income of listed companies in AI increases by an average of about 142 million yuan. In the future, the pull scale of the game industry to the artificial intelligence industry will continue to increase, which is expected to increase from 31.576 billion yuan in 2023 to 103.81 billion yuan in 2030, with an average annual growth rate of about 16%.

The report also looks forward to the future development of AI. It is mentioned that the next AI milestone may be born in a complex strategy game. It is expected that strategy games can simulate the ever-changing real environment, so that AI can learn perception, understanding, reasoning, decision-making, action and interaction in real time like human beings, and even "evolve" as the game iterates, thus playing a greater role.

Although the development direction of AI sounds more down-to-earth than the previous meta-universe, there are still some differences in the results of independent research and development and self-training. More than one Internet company quickly released its own AI tools, but the results were not particularly popular with users, and even made some jokes, such as a Chinese AI, which claimed to be a manufacturer's "self-training", was suspected of directly reversing the results of other more mature products. While the game industry can be incorporated into the workflow of AI, the most popular are still Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and even ChatGPT and other external tools.

With the help of cooperation with search engines, AI technology that can freely talk to human beings is within the reach of ordinary people, not that people are unwilling to support domestic enterprises. In some of the more unforgiving comments, some people say that the embarrassment of suddenly finding themselves unable to keep up with the wind is a kind of "earthly newspaper"-they believe that being "stuck in the neck" on AI is also "due" to the long-term social crackdown on the gaming industry, how righteous they were then, and how unconvincing they are now trying to catch up.

Of course, it can also be said that the backwardness of the AI field is not entirely due to this, and the logic behind this is not difficult to understand: gamers can basically understand the concept of "technology tree"-in games, technological development is often shown in the form of a tree, with clear context and clear logic. But in reality, we can only see the relationship between "achievements" in textbooks. It is often difficult to predict where the olive branch of new wind and new technology will emerge from and where it will fall, even if it is not completely random.

Ideally, we have accumulated in various fields and made preparations for development. The awkward situation is that, as it is now, the new technological revolution appears in a moribund field, simply because it is used for leisure and entertainment and is regarded as "worthless" or even "poisoning minors".

To put it bluntly, there is no point in playing games simply for entertainment and relaxation; for a more immersive experience, the pursuit of finer picture quality, higher frame rate, or closer to the real feel is of limited value, just to make players happier in the process of playing the game. who knows someone will take advantage of the computing power of the game graphics card to engage in machine learning, train AI, and really achieve remarkable results? Another fact is that much of the technological progress we have had access to in recent decades stems from "fun" (making people happier) and uncertainty based on it. When people want to artificially eliminate this uncertainty, it also kills the possibility of their own development to a large extent.

Without ifs, will there be a future? In previous years, mainstream public opinion placed special emphasis on "soft power" and devoted itself to promoting Chinese culture, which represents soft power. In order to achieve this goal, all parties have made great efforts, and overseas television channels, Confucius Institutes in charge of cultural and educational exchanges, and so on, have indeed achieved certain results. However, another trend of the incident surprised many people: around 2020, domestic online articles, especially Xianxia online articles, once formed a trend of "soft power export". In order to understand the concepts with cultural characteristics, such as "incense time", "skin condensing fat" and "practicing Zhenyuan", Chinese and foreign netizens cooperate closely, and many foreign readers specialize in learning Chinese by themselves, trying to figure out these mysterious concepts in person.

This kind of "inadvertently inserting willow into shade" does not sound like a good story-even if you want to insert willow branches, you must first have soil for growth. It's all magnificent steel and concrete, and the willow branches can't be inserted at all. At one time, the game industry also wanted to climb the kinship of "cultural export"-regardless of the type of game and background, as long as the characters were covered with national skin, attached some background stories related to historical allusions, and then tried to promote them overseas, you can claim that you have "carried forward the traditional culture."

However, in fact, some games do achieve success in overseas markets, but it is difficult to say how much they have to do with traditional culture. Throughout the successful domestic games that go out to sea, either the localization is flawless, and players can't find made in China at all without checking the information, or they are international themes such as Quadratic, Western Fiction, and so on. The former may not care about the domestic market at all. the latter is not popular at home-- with their own ability to break out a piece of online articles overseas, there is no particularly good life at home.

Until now, AI, which relies on graphics card and chip technology, seems to be really about to explode, and the gaming industry seems to be able to climb to the top. But talking about this topic over and over again is actually very tiring and repetitive-after a long circle, the gaming industry, and any industry, is still not out of the circle of "proving useful." the whole atmosphere and route are still too pragmatic and unnatural. Most game practitioners and players actually know very well that we don't want to see "games promote the development of graphics cards and AI" in terms of results. What we really want is that "games can be played just for fun, without any additional meaning." However, looking at the happy comments and cynicism on the Internet platform, we can still feel obvious nothingness and sadness. To put it too far, people seem to want to see the domestic industry fail in the AI technology tree and fall behind, so as to prove that a road that has been implemented for many years is wrong. If this mistake has not been reversed, it can only show that the price paid is not high enough. We could have measured things without such distorted logic. Yes, we could have.

In all kinds of media reports, scholars and experts have also come out to talk about a lot of things that have happened, and it is somewhat unrealistic to talk about "if" again. In June 2000, the Ministry of Culture and other seven ministries jointly issued the "opinions on carrying out special governance of electronic game business places", commonly known as "game console ban". After that, the development of the domestic game industry has almost nothing to do with the home phone market. But in spite of this, the demand and application of hardware in this industry, which is absolutely dominated by online games and mobile games, still makes a contribution to AI. This makes many people can't help but imagine what it would be like if the domestic game industry had let nature take its course-perhaps no better, but no worse.

Conclusion anyway, AI has come. From the perspective of the development of domestic AI-related industries, there are still a variety of possibilities in the future. In the process, gaming may be one of the most engaged and closely related industries. We hope that it can get some support, make some progress in technology, give birth to some good works and bring more choices to people.

But what is more important is the change of ideas-if we no longer cling to pragmatism and the logic of eagerness to work, and face up to the "worthless" pursuit of leisure and entertainment, we may be able to create a more inclusive environment for many new things, and even industries that temporarily seem "unable to generate electricity". In fact, compared with the limited promotion of public opinion because of its technical contribution, what the game needs most is this kind of tolerance.

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