Google's Playground Lets Anyone Build Video Games From a Text Prompt, but Results Are Mediocre
Google Labs this week launched Playground, an experimental service that generates playable browser games from plain-language descriptions. A Wired writer built three games in one day but found the results limited and strikingly similar to one another.
Google this week introduced Playground, an experimental service that lets people create video games by describing their idea in plain language. It sits within Google Labs, the company's page for AI experiments that have not yet become a full app or official service. Wired tested it, and its writer produced three playable games in a single day, though none was described as good.
How it works
Playground resembles a chatbot: users type the kind of game they want, and the system builds a working version directly in the browser. Further instructions can then adjust the design. Photos, videos or models can be uploaded as references; otherwise the visuals are generated by AI. Meta offers a comparable service, Horizon Create, announced in September. Other users can play the finished games by signing in with a Google account.
Three experiments
The first game, Pork Drop, came from a request for Tetris with cute pigs instead of blocks. After some refinement, it became a playable version in which each block is a squished pig, although some shapes looked odd.
The second, Dinner Darling, followed a colleague's suggestion of a gay dinner party. It is a 2D game in which the host prepares appetizers and cocktails for increasingly angry guests against a countdown. The author lost because he could not work out the controls in time.
The third, Neon Don, is a cyberpunk top-down shooter. It took the most work and, at the time of publication, had been played by seven other users, the most of any of the author's games.
Limitations
After a certain point Google throttles usage, and each new game or revision consumes part of the allowance. The author's allowance refreshes on October 14, so the games still have flaws. Wired concludes that the tool is fun and fairly intuitive, but its limits hold back its usefulness, and the games share a noticeable sameness, with nearly identical menus and music.
