Insider Q&A: John Riccitiello, CEO of online game software program firm Unity, on AI and gaming’s future

Daily SF NewsJune 26, 2023

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — John Riccitiello, CEO of video game software company Unity, has seen the video game industry…

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — John Riccitiello, the CEO of video game software company Unity, has seen the video game industry evolve and transform over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1997 when he became CEO of gaming giant Electronic Art .

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

The Associated Press: What are the biggest trends in gaming?

Riccitiello: I think AI is going to change gaming in pretty profound ways. One of them is to make games faster, cheaper and better. It’s already happening. I mean, you can already use AI for digital people and editing environments and all sorts of things that make it faster. It will also be possible to have experiences that were never possible before.

Q: Can you give some examples?

Riccitiello: You know Call of Duty, you know Grand Theft Auto, you know Candy Crush. Every one of these games, every single thing you see in this game, and every line of dialogue, every environment, every light effect was programmed by someone who expected you to use it. So the scope of the game is the content that is available on the DVD or for download on the internet. There is none left. It is what it is. They can expand it over time by patching games and adding levels. “Candy Crush” shipped at about 50 and now it’s what?

A: 10,000 I think.

Riccitiello: So they keep building. But each one is a self-contained experience. So I was involved in the release of The Sims in 2000 and it was a wonderful game. And you know how they used “Simlish” right? Did you know why? Because there are so many things to do in The Sims, it’s like an insane amount of interactions to have because you’re actually creating characters. These characters interact with each other. No writer could ever write all the appropriate dialogue for it. When finished it will be as big as the Library of Congress.

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

A: I’m sure you know where I’m going. The way GPT 4 works, you can define the parameters. A gamer could do this, or the game studio could do it. The game studio could allow the player to describe that character or their motivations in the same way they write in prompts to restore dialogue. And they could do this for all of their characters in advance. And the AI could appear in any language you want – English, Russian, Japanese, French, doesn’t matter. I think this is a breakthrough. It’s really hard to overstate how important this is. It lives.

Another example would be one of my favorite games of all time, Grand Theft Auto. And a lot of people like “Red Dead (Redemption)” because they’re such brilliant, realized worlds. Sam and Dan Houser, the guys who developed it at Take-Two Rockstar Games, are among the most powerful developers in history. But again, every store robbery, everything in the game was something they thought possible. Now what you can do is create this world and basically create a series of things like “This is the store”, “This is a criminal or not a criminal” or a player can say “This is a Criminals.” And then anything you can think of is possible, any interaction that would take place between the store and the criminals, including looking for a job there – I mean, anything is possible.

Q: But within the guidelines?

A: You wouldn’t have to have any policies, but it would look like a complete mess if you didn’t have anything. Some of these guard rails enable creativity.

Q: What do you think of the metaverse?

A: I always found the word cluttered and kind of stupid. I gave a talk a few years ago saying that I banned the people at Unity from using it because I thought it would be overused and thrown in the trash. That it has been used and abused by people for their own ends.

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

Q: How do you define it?

A: I said it’s the next version of the internet. It’s 3D instead of 2D. It’s more persistent than not, more real-time than not. And often there are a number of other things. And then I tried to explain what it wasn’t. It wasn’t about avatars, it wasn’t about XR. It certainly wasn’t about half-embodied avatars (which, by the way, were based on Meta’s Unity). I was very happy that they built it and paid us, but I just didn’t believe it was what it was.

We have clients like Hyundai who are building the factory of the future where all the robots and humans will interact and control in this large environment. And the people who work in the factory do their jobs on iPhones.

It will not be a universal 3D world. I think it will be more of a series of very immersive experiences. And a lot of people, I think, dominate in a way that I can’t believe, “No, no, you’re going to want to be on Amazon, then you go straight to Call of Duty and you go straight in.” See watch the NFL show and then go straight into your chat. And the thing is, it’s really hard to get this to work. People say, “Well, what if I want to throw a Call of Duty bomb at a chessboard I’m playing?” And you have to ask yourself: Would you really ever want to do that beyond the first time?