// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
I Made Terrible Games With Google’s AI Playground
Neon Don is really pissed at his ex-wife’s lawyer. He’ll tell you any chance he gets while he shotguns lines of pixelated bad guys. He’s also not real—his likeness has only existed for a few minutes in a top-down cyberpunk-style shooter game, generated in the Google Labs service, Playground.
“Keep shooting!” Neon Don says as he mows enemies down. “Brenda took everything else away!”
Playground, which Google launched this week, is part of Google Labs, the company’s landing page for its various AI experiments that haven’t made it into an app or official service quite yet. (Google has done this before with things like music production). It works similarly to Horizon Create, the game generation service Meta announced in September.
Playground is essentially vibe coding for video games, letting people describe in plain language what kind of game they want to make in a chatbot-like interface. Playground then builds a working in-browser version of a game. You can add further instructions to tweak the design from there. If you have assets you want to use as a reference, you can upload photos, videos, or models. Otherwise, the visuals and designs are all AI-generated.
The process of making a game is very straightforward, conversational, and responsive. That means it is perfect for dummies like me with little to no video game development chops or even decent coding skills. By simply throwing out some ideas, I built three playable, stable, and not even remotely good games in one day.
My first work was Pork Drop, a result generated from the prompt: “Tetris but with cute pigs instead of blocks.” I typed that in, hit build. The AI chugged, then spit out a farm-themed version of Tetris with little pig faces drawn on every block.
I had to iterate a bit to realize my vision, telling the AI not just to stick pig faces on the blocks, but to have the blocks shaped like distorted pigs. “Each block is a pig,” I wrote, “contorted into the shape of the Tetris blocks. Make ’em look a little squished, but still cute!” This resulted in a clean, playable version of Tetris, though the occasional block looked like a T-posed pig with its legs spread eagle. The AI suggested the title Piggy Stacker, but I thought mine was better. (I’m right.)
The next game idea came courtesy of my colleague Jay Dayrit, who, when asked what kind of game I should make, immediately requested, “Gay dinner party.” I typed that in.
With no follow-up requests, the result was a 2D flash-style game called Dinner Darling. The art looks like everyone is a Bitmoji. You’re placed in the shoes of a very stressed-out-looking host, Julian, who is tasked with hosting a fancy dinner party with fussy guests who can’t seem to sit in their chairs at the table. As timers count down, you have to prepare various artisanal bruschettas and espresso martinis for your increasingly angry guests.
After it generates, I give the game a shot and fail miserably, unable to figure out the controls in time to bring my guests a timely pastry or cocktail. (Sasha, one of the guests, required numerous espresso cocktails in a row.) “PARTY CATASTROPHE,” the game over screen read.