Across 1,700 stands, nobody advertises AI

Anyone walking a fair like this finds signage for everything. PC, handheld, console, cloud streaming, ultrawide. One term is missing, and it is missing so completely that it stands out: artificial intelligence. In every other industry this is currently the word used to buy attention. Here nobody advertises with it. At the same time the industry association explains that the technology has been in use for decades. Both cannot be true at once, and the contradiction leads to the more interesting questions.

The look that explains everything

In the indie hall you can talk to developers, that is its appeal. A question about AI in software development drew a look from one stand that can only be described as horror. A glance at the game explained it: it advertised explicitly with hand-drawn graphics.

The misstep was instructive. Anyone putting a lot of time into handcraft now competes with a flood of quickly generated titles on the same storefronts. Being heard at all in that volume is hard enough for a small studio. The distinction is then not a culture war but marketing out of necessity.

The same logic applies in the other direction. One studio made public that it had used AI in the conception phase and backed away again after the reaction. Where developers are open about it, negative reviews accumulate regardless of whether the game is good. The market punishes the admission, not the result.

What the association means and what might be meant

At the edge of the fair, Felix Falk, managing director of the industry association game, explained that AI is nothing new and that game development has been using it for decades. The sentence reassures and explains nothing. Decades means more than ten years, and what ran under the term in that time ranges from pathfinding and enemy behaviour to tools that have nothing to do with today's models.

That is precisely the underlying problem of the debate. If code completion already counts, then every studio works with AI. If only generated game worlds count, then almost none does. Without that distinction, critics and association are talking about different things and accusing each other of dishonesty. About one major forthcoming title there was a report that no AI is in use at all. That sentence, too, is worthless without a definition.

The numbers contradict the gut feeling

At two points the rejection becomes brittle. A study by the University of Bristol evaluated 122 play sessions with AI-generated characters. 95 percent of participants found the interaction more fun. So people who experience it, without it having been announced, like it.

The second point concerns the age distribution. You would expect the younger generation to be more open. In fact it is the 18 to 24 year olds among whom approval sits in the low single-digit percentages, while from 45 upwards it is considerably higher. For an industry whose target group is young, that is the more uncomfortable of the two figures.

What characters with a memory would change

The appeal lies not in better graphics but in behaviour. Today's game worlds are open as long as you move within the script. In a dense city setting you can do all sorts of things, but you cannot step behind the counter of a food stall and sell for yourself. Even a strong game with a good story has dialogue between the high points that you click away.

The image that stands for this in the episode comes from Jens Scharnetzki: anyone who leaves a slain enemy outside the innkeeper's door the evening before will not be greeted cheerfully the next morning. That is the real application, characters that react to what actually happened. The flip side came up just as clearly in the conversation. A companion who is always available and tells you what you want to hear is not a neutral offering, particularly not for people who spend a lot of time in such worlds.

That such systems cannot be steered like a script is not speculation. In experiments with agents in open worlds, division of labour, trade and even something resembling religions emerged, without anyone having planned it. And gaming history knows the case without AI as well: in the early days of World of Warcraft a player carried a plague from an end fight into the cities via his companion animal, where it killed players and characters alike, until the operators reset the state.

Conclusion

The question of whether games should use AI has effectively been decided. They do, only quietly. What remains open is where the line between tool and content runs, and nobody is currently drawing that line, neither the critics nor the association.

For everyone outside the industry an observation remains that transfers well: an admission to the technology currently costs more than the result brings in. Anyone who takes that for a gaming phenomenon should check how many products in their own environment carry a label nobody would have missed.