Earlier this year, Microsoft added a new key to Windows keyboards for the first time since 1994. Before the news dropped, your mind might’ve raced with the possibilities and potential usefulness of a new addition. However, the button ended up being a Copilot launcher button that doesn’t even work in an innovative way.
Logitech announced a new mouse last week. I was disappointed to learn that the most distinct feature of the Logitech Signature AI Edition M750 is a button located south of the scroll wheel. This button is preprogrammed to launch the ChatGPT prompt builder, which Logitech recently added to its peripherals configuration app Options+.
Similarly to Logitech, Nothing is trying to give its customers access to ChatGPT quickly. In this case, access occurs by pinching the device. This month, Nothing announced that it “integrated Nothing earbuds and Nothing OS with ChatGPT to offer users instant access to knowledge directly from the devices they use most, earbuds and smartphones.”
In the gaming world, for example, MSI announced this year a monitor with a built-in NPU and the ability to quickly show League of Legends players when an enemy from outside of their field of view is arriving.
Another example is AI Shark’s vague claims. This year, it announced technology that brands could license in order to make an “AI keyboard,” “AI mouse,” “AI game controller” or “AI headphones.” The products claim to use some unspecified AI tech to learn gaming patterns and adjust accordingly.
Despite my pessimism about the droves of AI marketing hype, if not AI washing, likely to barrage the next couple of years of tech announcements, I have hope that consumer interest and common sense will yield skepticism that stops some of the worst so-called AI gadgets from getting popular or misleading people.
I’ve said in the past that I think that the long run is gonna be that there are two paths to send today’s competitive multiplayer games down as they evolve.
Esports. Here, you don’t just want another human as a convenient opponent to make the game fun. You specifically want to test one player against another. You have trusted hardware, and you lock it down to give a relatively-level playing field. Consoles are closer to this than computers; being an open hardware system plays poorly with this. XBox has whitelisted controllers and hardware authentication these days.
It may be that at least a portion of games in this genre optimize for being a good spectator sport, for the enjoyment of the viewer rather then the players, the way professional sports do.
Make better game AI as an opponent and make the game single-player. I think that a lot of games are gonna go this route. I mean, multiplayer competitive games are there in large part because we aren’t good at doing good game AI and humans can stand in for that to some degree. But there are a whole host of problems with multiplayer competitive games, and it’s fundamental to the genre. You can’t just pause to deal with real life, like a kid or a phone call (well, not with games with any great number of players, and it’s obnoxious even when there are only a few). Cheating is an issue, breaks enjoyment of other players. Someone has to lose half the time on average, and that’s probably not optimal from a player enjoyment standpoint. Ragequitting is a thing. Humans don’t necessarily all want to stay in-character. Griefing is a thing. Games have to be online. There is some level of pay-to-win in terms of better network connection or computing hardware, and to the extent that there isn’t, you have to restrict players from using what they want. You need a sufficient number of players in your playerbase, and if you don’t get it, your game fails. When your game – inevitably – loses enough players from its playerbase, it no longer is really playable as a game. Setting difficulty is inevitably imperfect, has to rely on what you can do with matchmaking. Optimal play may not be what’s optimally fun for other players, one gets things like camping a spawn point, so you’re always having to structure the game world around linking the two. People who lose may not deal well with it, get upset with other people. I mean, the list goes on. I think that the end game here is making better game AI that’s cheaper to include in a game and requires less expertise to do so. Maybe making generic “AI” engines the way we have graphics or physics engines. Shifting away from multiplayer competitive games towards single-player games with better game AI.