Why Elon Musk’s AI game studio can only be a bad idea -.

Although he’s been posting about it for a while now, it seems Elon Musk is becoming increasingly determined to create an AI game studio with his xAI in the hopes of “making video games great again”.

This move largely reads like Elon once again stepping into uncharted waters, hoping to piggyback on the success of those who really know what they’re doing. As an avid gamer, there is no doubt why he has shown interest in the medium, but wading into his own bold claims feels about as useful to the industry as throwing a bowling ball into a fish pond.

That Musk’s AI game studio is a bad idea has little to do with his politics. If someone had the same idea and was equally inexperienced, I would draw the same conclusion. It just so happens that this is a man who has the resources to be able to realize in reality what is essentially the whim of a tweet or two.

It is highly unlikely that anything will come out of this proposed game studio except a bit of hype driven by Elon’s most loyal fans, and the biggest haters of anything that starts with a W and rhymes with coke. The years it takes to properly develop a game that can meet the standards Elon and gamers would expect is probably more trouble than Mr. Musk anticipated. Making a game is hard. We’re not yet at the point where you can just ask ChatGPT to do it for you. It is even further behind than the so-called AI movies, which look like a technical demo made by a disgusting incestuous baby with an oil painting. It is likely that this effort means that the xAI studio will remain as a concept, something that can be brought up again and again in support, but will not produce results.

Even as work begins on an AI game, whatever that looks like, there is a distinct lack of direction and purpose for this studio and whatever project it can deliver. Looking at posts by Elon (scattered throughout this article), especially the video below, it seems that the only desire he has is to remove DEI and wake up from gaming. As is often the case with these arguments, those two buzzwords are for little more than drumming up ideas in people’s minds about what they consider bad. Also in the short video, Musk, like a failing stand-up comedian, addresses the audience and says he hates it when a game is interrupted by “DEI woke bullshit”.

Are some games progressive? Of course, always have been. Do some games have dialogue that feels like HR is in the room? Sure. But to claim that art has been killed, or that politics has overtaken gaming, is hugely reductive, especially in a medium that allows you to choose what to engage with. It is very interesting to get this argument from someone whose last obsessions were Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2, two titles released very recently. If the whole purpose of this studio is just to make an anti-woke game, then that’s just not good enough to compete with the best games we see today, in exactly the same way that a game that pins its sales on being woke will not win a wide audience.

Sure, we’re still in our infancy at this point, but usually when we see the announcement of a new studio, that studio knows what it wants to make. Whether it’s elaborate RPGs or well-crafted stories, you know what to expect, at least to a vague degree. But with the xAI studio, there is no idea – at least not one granted to the public – of what this holy grail of games is going to be. Generate as many depictions of a white, chiseled man as a knight as you want, it won’t make it a playable, enjoyable game. People in the comments on Elon’s post have all sorts of wild expectations, but unfortunately for them, the most likely option is that none of them will be met.

Even the idea of this being an AI game studio provides a laughable contradiction to Elon’s own arguments that art is being destroyed. Nothing says art is as backwards as the involvement of an all-powerful machine that generates everything, right? It’s not just about the fact that AI is currently only being considered to support game development, it’s about once again business-minded individuals entering a creative space thinking that two magic letters can serve as a substitute for the endless hours required to create a movie, game or book. The whole point is not just to make something that looks pretty and plays well. As gamers become more aware of what goes into development, it becomes increasingly impressive to see how much care a developer puts into the details. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Baldur’s Gate III and Astro Bot are just a few recent examples of games that now more than ever show that a human hand can still guide us to our best experiences.

That’s something I don’t think AI enthusiasts will ever get. It’s an impressive technology and will be used more and more in the future, but to just slap the letters on something to try to generate hype just feels hollow. If this studio comes to fruition, if Elon Musk makes a game, I don’t see how it will do any less damage to the art than the games that apparently interrupt him all the time to talk about waking nonsense.