Q&A: John Riccitiello, CEO of video game company Unity, on AI and the future of gaming

John Riccitiello, CEO of the video game company Unity, has seen the video game industry change and evolve over the past 10 years, starting in 1997 when he became the head of the big games at Electronic Arts.

Unity Software Inc., was founded in Denmark and is now based in San Francisco. It is working with Apple to help bring games to its upcoming flagship, Vision Pro. Riccitiello recently spoke with The Associated Press about how artificial intelligence is changing the way video games are created and played.

The Associated Press: What are the next big things in sports?

Riccitiello: I think AI will change the game in a number of very profound ways. One of them is that it will make games faster, cheaper and better. It’s already happening. I mean, you can already use AI for digital people and change centers and all kinds of things that make it faster. It will also be possible to recognize events that were not possible before.

Q: Can you provide samples?

Riccitiello: You know “Call of Duty,” you know “Grand Theft Auto,” you know “Candy Crush.” Every game, everything you see in the game and every line of dialogue, every place, every lighting was written by someone waiting for you to use it. So part of the game is what’s put on DVD or online. no more. It is what it is. They can add to it over time with game patches and add levels. “Candy Crush” sent 50 and now what?

A: 10,000 I think.

Riccitiello: So they just add up. But everything is an experience. So, I participated in the launch of “The Sims” in 2000, and it was a great game. And you know how he used “Simlish,” right? Do you know why? Because there are so many things you can do in “The Sims,” ​​it’s like a crazy rush you can have because you’re creating characters. Those qualities are interconnected. No writer can write all the relevant discussions about it. It will be as big as the Library of Congress when finished.

Q: I think I know where you’re going with this.

A: You know where I’m going, I’m sure. The way GPT 4 works, you can define partitions. The player can do this or the game studio can do it. A game studio can allow the player to describe the character or their motivations, so you can quickly type, so they can come back to the conversation. And they can do this to all their characters in advance. And the AI ​​can produce any language you want – English, Russian, Japanese, French, it doesn’t matter. I think that’s a win. It’s really hard to explain how important it is. It’s life.

Another example would be one of my all time favorite games, “Grand Theft Auto.” And a lot of people like “Red Dead Redemption” because it’s a smart, recognizable world. Sam and Dan Houser, the guys who made it at Take-Two Rockstar Games, are some of the most powerful developers in history. But, again, every store messes up, everything in the game was something they thought was possible. Now what you can do is you can create the world and you can create things like “this is a store,” “this is a criminal or not a criminal,” or the player can say “this is a criminal.” And then anything you can think of, any interaction that can happen between the store and the gang is possible, including getting a job there-I mean anything is possible.

Q: But in the instructions?

A: You don’t have to have instructions, but it can look confusing if you don’t have anything. Some of these protections help in production.

Q: What are your thoughts on the metaverse?

A: I always thought that word was full of nonsense. I gave a talk a few years ago saying that I used to discourage people from using Unity because I thought it would be overused and trashed. That it was being used and abused by people for their own purposes.

But then I defined the metaverse as something very different from what most people do.

Q: How do you define it?

A: I said it’s the next generation of the Internet. It’s 3D not 2D. It’s persistence and not, it’s real time and not. And often many other things. And then I tried to explain what it wasn’t. It wasn’t about avatars, it wasn’t about XR. It wasn’t nearly half-assed avatars (which, by the way, were built on Unity by Meta). I was very happy that they were building and paying us, I didn’t think that was the case.

We have clients like Hyundai building the factory of the future, where all the robots and people are interacting in this big environment and controlling it. And people who work in factories are doing their jobs on iPhones.

It is not a single 3D world. I think it’s possible to be a group of very deep experiences. And a lot of people, I think, pontificate in a way that I don’t buy, that “no, no, you want to be on Amazon, then go into “Call of Duty” and go in. The NFL show is going into your social media. And the thing is, it’s very difficult to And you have to ask yourself, would you really want to do this the first time you did it?