Before the disaster that was Stadia, Google demoed the game streaming tech via the free version of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. You can play in your browser. My fiancé has been making nights cry slowly at work, playing this massive triple-A game firmly, and having some uneven memories with the awkward library Optip Rex.
Whatever came with Stadia and game streaming in general, the demo felt like black magic. If a truly impressive tech demo could lead to an infamous industry flop, what about obviously impressive?
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What is the ethic that consumes a lot of capital, energy, and man time, rather than a worse version of the game 30 years ago? These are the questions I contemplated playing the second game in my life in Microsoft’s Copilot AI Research Demo of Quake 2.
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“This bite-sized demo brings you into an interactive space inspired by Quake II, and AI creates immersive visuals and responsive action on the fly,” reads the demo on Microsoft’s Q&A page. “This is a groundbreaking glimpse of a brand new way of interacting with the game and turning cutting-edge research into a quick, compelling, playable demo.”
This demo features a “World and Human Action Model” (WHAM), a generation AI model that allows you to dynamically create gameplay visuals and simulate player behavior in real time. Perusing Microsoft’s Nature articles with technology, it appears to work on similar principles to large-scale language models and image generators, using recorded gameplay and input for training instead of static text and images.
This demo is not running on the original game’s ID Tech 2 engine. However, Microsoft generates this demo. This is some sort of bespoke engine with similar output to Quake 2, as the AI model behind Quake 2 is trained on Quake 2.
I recall the DOOM destruction of Texas instrument calculators, but instead of marshalling limited resources to create an inferior impression of existing games, Copilot Gaming Experience is the result of Microsoft’s (and the entire tech industry) Herculean Push for Generic AI.
We don’t know how much the individual Copilot Gaming Project costs, but Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in calculating, researching and lobbying the technology. In Bluesky, developer Sosowski pointed out that Microsoft’s Nature Paper lists 22 authors, as opposed to the 13 developers behind Quake 2.
Based on this paper, Sosowski estimated that Microsoft’s new model requires more than 3 megawatts of power to produce consistent results. This assumes the use of the RTX 5090, which is likely given the timing of the publication of the paper, but it still helps to understand the scope of the power draw for this project. According to battery manufacturer Pkenergy, a single megawatt requires 3,000 to 4,000 solar panels to produce.
Despite all that investment, the demo is not good. Copilot Gaming Experience runs like a slideshow in a small window in the center of your browser. Its nastyness and confused Goopy visuals are familiar to those who have seen the AI-generated video. The only game that set my belly on Rambrin, the evil vievil, approached the time mark.
And while the chatbot tells you to eat rocks and drink piss, Copilot Gaming Experience has its own fun “hatography.” This is a surreal and unexpectedly confident error generated by generative AI models where large amounts of money, electricity, and unsuppressed access appears to be incapable of handling access to uncopyrighted materials.
Looking at the floor or ceiling anytime in Copilot Gaming Experience is about 80% likely to completely change the room in front of you, just like you teleported somewhere on the level.
Of course, there is no “level,” goal, or victory requirement. The Copilot gaming experience constantly creates a new Quake 2-like environment right in front of you every time you turn the corner.
One such warp moment sent me to Shadow Realm. There’s an “enemy”, but when I killed it transformed into some sort of blob. I then passed it and turned around and the hallway completely changed and took a chunk with it.
Like many of the generative AI and blockchain booms before that, you can imagine “Well, it’s just WIP, the first step type.” There may be certain persuasive use cases for generative AI tools, but that insists on packing this into everything, not something we have actively sold and sold and counted for the past two years. Google Gemini is always asking if I need that help, like some kind of scary, last-day clip.
The forced mass adoption of such things by consumers now calls for our approval, attention and precious time. There are demonstrations of public technology. The fate of the calculator, but to get it, boil a lake or two, is said to be the future of the game. I reject this future. Not only did it feel philosophically and ethically abomination, it also hurt my stomach.
