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 – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.
In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We 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’ve ever played.”
But, but, but, but … There is a small irony to Arc’s 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 behavior and animation of its robot enemies, a different type of “AI”, which video games have been using for ever.) Games writer Rick Lane found this to be so ethically compromising that he couldn’t look past it. “For 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 – carving up human voices and reassembling them like a digital Victor Frankenstein – demonstrates a lack of artistic integrity that I find impossible to ignore,” he wrote for Eurogamer.
Generative AI in video game development is becoming a red-line issue for many players (although it’s impossible to tell how many – 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 (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’s success, you could say the same about its AI voice lines.
It is an existential issue for video game workers – artists, writers and voice actors particularly, but also coders – who may be at risk of losing out to this technology. Many believe that gaming’s 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’s internal suite of AI tools, even though they are apparently widely hated. And then there’s Krafton, which proudly declared itself an AI-first game developer before offering its Korean employees voluntary redundancy.
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’s Tim Sweeney – net worth $5bn, give or take – posted on dialogue, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialogue based on and tuned by human voice actors?”
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: “Will 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.”
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 – digital “artworks” 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 spectacularly. When the big tech world suddenly latched on to the idea of the “metaverse” 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.
What we’re seeing play out looks like a familiar struggle between the people who actually make things, and those who profit off that labor. We’re 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.
What to play
From the people behind the devastating Before Your Eyes comes Goodnight Universea game in which you play a super-intelligent six-month-old baby with psychic powers. It’s narrated by the baby’s inner monologue: wee Isaac suspects that he’s 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’t expecting. It also made me nostalgic for the relative past, when my children were still babies.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PS5, Xbox
Estimated playtime: three to four hours
What to read
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Nintendo has released the first image from the upcoming legend of zelda moviestarring 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’ll be a part of the action rather than a damsel in distress.
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The nominations for December’s Games awards are out, led by Ghost of Yōtei, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Death Stranding 2. ( has been a voting outlet for the awards previously, but is not this year.) As we reported last week, the annual event recently dropped its Future Class program for up-and-coming developers, who have described feeling like props.
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A band of modders have brought Sony’s infamously canceled shooter concord back to life – but the company has brought down the ban hammer, issuing take-down notices for gameplay footage shared on YouTube. Its servers are still up – for now.
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Question Block
reader Jude asks this week’s question:
“I started No Man’s Sky recently. It’s the first game I’ve ever played that feels like it could, at some pointturn into something to live in – like Ready Player One, or the now ubiquitous Japanese Isekai scenario (where characters are sucked into an alternate world). Does anybody else out there have a game they could live in?”
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 – 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 Cyrodiilfrom 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’t want a world that’s overwhelmingly huge. I’d want one that’s comfortably conquerable.
I can think of plenty of virtual places. wouldn’t want to live – World of Warcraft’s Azeroth is too dangerous, the Mushroom Kingdom is so colorful it would hurt your brain, and don’t get me started on Elden Ring’s Lands Between, Hyrule is too lonely; with No Man’s Sky, it’s mostly the other players that make it interesting.
I’ll throw this one out to the readership: is there a video game universe you’d want to inhabit?
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on [email protected].
