Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines \u2013 and each other. Can you trust the other raider you\u2019ve spotted on your way back to humanity\u2019s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you\u2019ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I\u2019ve talked to about this game.<\/p>\n
In a review for Gamespot<\/a>, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders\u2019s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: \u201cWe can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I\u2019ve ever played.\u201d<\/p>\n But, but, but, but \u2026 There is a small irony to Arc\u2019s depiction of humanity united against the machines. The game uses AI-generated text-to-speech voices, trained on real actors. (The game also uses machine learning to improve the behaviour and animation of its robot enemies, a different type of \u201cAI\u201d, which video games have been using for ever.) Games writer Rick Lane found this to be so ethically compromising that he couldn\u2019t look past it. \u201cFor Arc Raiders to ride the wave of human sociability all the way to the bank, while also being so contemptuous of the thing that makes us social animals \u2013 carving up human voices and reassembling them like a digital Victor Frankenstein \u2013 demonstrates a lack of artistic integrity that I find impossible to ignore,\u201d he wrote for Eurogamer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Generative AI in video game development is becoming a red-line issue for many players (although it\u2019s impossible to tell how many \u2013 neither social media outrage nor Steam forum sentiment are reliable predictors of how most people actually feel). It gives a lot of people, myself included, the ick. Last week, the new Call of Duty also came under fire<\/a> (sorry) for using supposedly AI-generated art; people absolutely hate it. Proponents of the use of generative AI in games often say that it empowers smaller developers to do more with less, but Call of Duty is a multibillion-dollar franchise. Activision can more than afford to pay artists to draw something. Given Arc Raiders\u2019s success, you could say the same about its AI voice lines.<\/p>\n It is an existential issue for video game workers \u2013 artists, writers and voice actors particularly, but also coders \u2013 who may be at risk of losing out to this technology. Many believe that gaming\u2019s corporate overlords would be thrilled to replace expensive, inconvenient humans with machines that generate inadequate but functional work. Take EA, which is mandating that its employees use the company\u2019s internal suite of AI tools, even though they are apparently widely hated<\/a>. And then there\u2019s Krafton, which proudly declared itself an AI-first game developer before offering its Korean employees voluntary redundancy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Under fire \u2026 Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has been called out for using AI-generated art. Photograph: Activision<\/p>\n Indeed, most of the people rushing to defend the use of generative AI in games are not everyday players or on-the-ground developers, but the corporate class. Epic\u2019s Tim Sweeney \u2013 net worth $5bn, give or take \u2013 posted on X a series of replies to Eurogamer\u2019s Arc Raiders review, beginning with the familiar, facepalm-inducing entreaty to keep \u201cpolitics\u201d out of video game reviews (\u201cPolitical opinions should go into op-eds folks.). Sweeney argued that generative AI could \u201ctransform gaming\u201d, evoking a dystopian vision of the future: \u201cInstead of games having a few dozen or hundred lines of prerecorded dialogue, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialogue based on and tuned by human voice actors?\u201d<\/p>\n Personally, I do not want a machine constantly generating things it thinks I want to hear. I would rather have characters speak lines written by humans with something to say, performed by other humans who understand that meaning. As the award-winning video game actor Jane Perry put it in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz<\/a>: \u201cWill a bot scuttle up to the stage at the Games awards or the Baftas to accept an award for best performance? I think most audiences prefer a real human performance; however, the creative drive of the tech elite is incredibly strong, especially when the name of the game is to replace humans with machines.\u201d<\/p>\n In my many years covering this beat, I have noticed that what happens in the video game world often happens in the wider world. A few years ago, there was a rush of investment in Web3\/blockchain-driven games that bought into the idea of NFTs \u2013 digital \u201cartworks\u201d that people could own and trade, all of which were just unbelievably ugly, all rad skulls and gurning computer-generated apes smoking cigars; thankfully, that bubble burst<\/a> spectacularly. When the big tech world suddenly latched on to the idea of the \u201cmetaverse\u201d<\/a> a few years ago, gaming companies had already been building much better versions of that idea for decades. And Gamergate provided a blueprint for the weaponisation of disaffected young men that directly influenced the Trump campaign playbook and set the template for the now omnipresent culture wars. This is why anyone interested in the impact of AI on work and culture should be looking at the ripples that that technology is making among developers and players. It can be an interesting predictor.<\/p>\n What we\u2019re seeing play out looks like a familiar struggle between the people who actually make things, and those who profit off that labour. We\u2019re also seeing players question whether they should pay the same money for games that include lower-quality, machine-generated art and voices. And we are seeing new lines being drawn around which uses of AI are culturally and ethically acceptable, and which are not.<\/p>\n What to playA plot less travelled \u2026 Goodnight Universe. Photograph: Nice Dream\/Skybound Games<\/p>\n From the people behind the devastating Before Your Eyes comes Goodnight Universe, a game in which you play a super-intelligent six-month-old baby with psychic powers<\/a>. It\u2019s narrated by the baby\u2019s inner monologue: wee Isaac suspects that he\u2019s a lot smarter than a baby should be, and finds it exceptionally frustrating that he seems unable to communicate his thoughts and feelings to his family. But soon he develops telekinetic abilities and the power to read minds, attracting unwanted attention. If you have a webcam, you can play it with your eyes, by looking around and blinking. This game packs an emotional punch and the plot also goes places I wasn\u2019t expecting. It also made me nostalgic for the relative past, when my children were still babies.<\/p>\n Available on: PC, Nintendo<\/a> Switch 2, PS5, Xbox What to readFirst look \u2026 Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as Link and Bo Bragason as Zelda in The Legend of Zelda film, coming in 2027. Photograph: Nintendo\/Sony<\/p>\n Nintendo has released the first image from the forthcoming Legend of Zelda movie, starring Bo Bragason and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, pictured here lounging in a meadow. In it, Link looks very Ocarina of Time; I am reassured that Princess Zelda is holding a bow, which hopefully indicates she\u2019ll be a part of the action rather than a damsel in distress.<\/p>\n The nominations<\/a> for December\u2019s Game awards are out, led by Ghost of Y\u014dtei, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Death Stranding 2. (The Guardian has been a voting outlet for the awardspreviously, but is not this year.) As we reported last week<\/a>, the annual event recently dropped its Future Class programme for up-and-coming developers, who have described feeling like props.<\/p>\n A band of modders have brought Sony\u2019s infamously cancelled shooter Concord back to life<\/a> \u2013 but the company has brought down the ban hammer, issuing take-down notices for gameplay footage shared on YouTube. Its servers are still up \u2013 for now.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Pushing Buttons<\/p>\n Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n What to clickQuestion BlockFantasy universe \u2026 Cyrodiil in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Photograph: Bethesda Game Studios<\/p>\n Reader Jude asks this week\u2019s question:<\/p>\n \u201cI started No Man\u2019s Sky recently. It\u2019s the first game I\u2019ve ever played that feels like it could, at some point, turn into something to live in \u2013 like Ready Player One, or the now ubiquitous Japanese isekai<\/a> scenario [where characters are sucked into an alternate world]. Does anybody else out there have a game they could live in?\u201d<\/p>\n I had this feeling when I first played Oblivion, 20 years ago. Playing the remaster, I now find this notion laughable, but at the time I thought the game had everything I needed \u2013 towns and cities and delicious-looking food and books. It has interesting people and anthropomorphic lions and lizards, magic and weapons and vampires. If I could have, I would have lived in Cyrodiil, from The Elder Scrolls (above). It seems small now, compared to modern open-world games, but I think if I were to spend hours jacked into some kind of fantasy universe instead of my actual life, I wouldn\u2019t want a world that\u2019s overwhelmingly huge. I\u2019d want one that\u2019s comfortingly conquerable.<\/p>\n I can think of plenty of virtual places I wouldn\u2019t want to live \u2013 World of Warcraft\u2019s Azeroth is too dangerous, the Mushroom Kingdom is so colourful it would hurt your brain, and don\u2019t get me started on Elden Ring\u2019s Lands Between. Hyrule is too lonely; with No Man\u2019s Sky, it\u2019s mostly the other players that make it interesting.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll throw this one out to the readership: is there a video game universe you\u2019d want to inhabit?<\/p>\n
Estimated playtime: three to four hours<\/p>\n