Microsoft has collected vast amounts of clips from the multiplayer title "Bleeding edge", where what happens on the screen has been recorded. Moreover, the player's button presses have been stored. The data forms the basis for the American tech giant's new AI model, called Muse.
Muse can simulate a sequence from "Bleeding edge", with all its rules – such as physics and gravity, outside the actual game, according to a recent study.
Trying to understand
Part of the work involved gathering information about what game developers really want in terms of tools.
We tried to understand what kind of innovations they really need to unlock creative workflows that put them at the center, says article author Katja Hofmann at Microsoft Research.
What makes the model special is that it is possible to pause the playback, for example, to insert new objects or characters, and then continue the playback, which then takes into account the changes.
For game creators, this means that they can quickly test making small changes to the game and see how it affects the experience directly.
This is normally a slow and complicated process. People who make games dream of a tool where you can simply go into the game, fix it, and get immediate feedback, says Julian Togelius, who researches AI and games as a guest professor at the University of Skövde and New York University Tandon.
Has limitations
The model has some limitations. Above all, hundreds of thousands of played hours are currently needed. It thus requires, in principle, that the game is already released and is relatively popular in order to build models.
Microsoft states that, for example, new tracks could be built using the model.
We are very much looking forward to the possibilities, where this can lead when it comes to interactive new experiences generated by interactive, generative AI models, says Hofmann.
It is clear that Microsoft in the study is trying to avoid the discussion about AI taking jobs from game creators. Julian Togelius says that he does not believe that anyone will be replaced in this case.
No matter how fascinating tools you get, you still need creative people who design, write, and so on, he says.
Microsoft has created an AI model of the type "World and human action model – WHAM". The model is called Muse and is a generative AI model that can recreate a game's appearance, button presses on the controller, or both.
The model has been trained on the multiplayer title "Bleeding edge", an action game from 2020 where you play four against four on an arena. Behind the title is Microsoft-owned Ninja Theory. The game has not been developed since 2021, but is still playable.
The study is published in the journal Nature.
