Is Vibe Coding a Game?

0:00 Hey, welcome to the stand-up. It's... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Hold on, guys.

0:32 I haven't moved the ticket over. Okay, we just got done doing our weekly complaint about Riverside. You didn't even let me get into in progress. You guys just went so fast. Let me move it over here. We're done now. We can do the intro, Trash. Why don't you tell us about what you're doing, Trash? Wait, no, you do the intro.

0:47 You gotta do the intro. Your mic. Wait, why do I hear two primes? I don't know what you did to your mic. Let's hear two primes. But you're a thousand times louder than you were about five seconds ago. Dude, it's Riverside. It's Riverside. I'm a thousand times louder? No, no, Chad is spamming way too dank and a bunch of other stuff.

1:02 That's a different mic. Really? My ears are exploding. I didn't touch anything. Oh, my goodness. It's because it's Riverside. I'm telling you. No, it's not Riverside. That one, no, because he's not sending Riverside audio of his own mic to Twitch. He's destroying that himself. Okay, well, I must have pushed a button.

1:18 I don't know. There you go, Chad. It's back. It's normal. Okay, I'll take the L on this one. Skateo theory in action. We only have 45 minutes. Start the podcast. Somebody start the podcast. Literally trying, and then they're like, Trash, where are you going? And I'm just like, bro, I got to do the intro.

1:34 Okay. Do it. hey do it welcome to the stand up today we are talking about the intro no i'm just reading what's on the screen today we are talking about is gaming dead are agents the new game what is friendship slop and can vibe coding a game be a game of course today with us as always we have the legendary casey miratori which is a legendary programmer he knows everything he's going to teach us all the stuff we need to know Thank you, Casey.

2:02 Literally, there are no legends about me. So I don't know where it comes from, but okay. Continue. Not true. Oh, we're starting some. Oh, not true, Casey. You've already been mythological-sized, and so you're already way beyond everything. That time I fought the dragon was awesome. Sex, yeah, Sex Spiral, Casey.

2:19 Yeah, Sex Spiral Casey. We all know about this. Good point. That is a legend. That is a legend. I got a slug story that I'm going to, I've been waiting to roll out that's the sequel to that. So one day it'll happen. Anyway, continue Prime. Okay. Well, I did not realize that slugs also have some very fantastic story.

2:35 Also with us today, we have Trash. Trash is also a legend, but in his own way for having one password in which was hacked. TJ. Whatever. TJ, co-host, king of puns. Dad of dads. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us. He's my dad. I made a putt-putt game recently. So that's kind of my game dev history.

2:58 So I just wanted to share. Like putt-putt saves the zoo like that putt-putt? No, like mini golf. I don't know what pup putt is. Pup putt saves the zoo. Sorry. Who is this pup putt, and why do they need to save a zoo? Jeez, guys, come on. We're talking about... Quick. So in gaming history, you may have heard of something called the Secret of Monkey Island or the Scum Engine, S-C-U-M-M, Story Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion.

3:23 Anyone? Anyone? Anyone? I've heard of some of those words before, but I don't know anything about them. In different contexts. I've actually heard all those words. I've just never heard them in that order. Wait, is this in the same people as Freddie Fish? Yes. Okay, all right. Well, now we're talking, Casey.

3:42 The guy who basically created the modern point-and-click adventure, Ron Gilbert. Okay. And his team, Dave Taylor, like these guys. They were at LucasArts, the game company that was, you know, founded by – that was like a George Lucas sub-studio thing. Right. They left that after making Scum and the tools for it and shipping a bunch of stuff.

4:11 They made Scrum? Scum. The thing we based this podcast on? No, I know. I know. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. I know. Sorry. So they left LucasArts at one point and formed a company called Humongous Entertainment. And that they made, they had a series of games for kids. They made kids games. It was a putt-putt saves using scum, using the engine that they made at LucasArts.

4:35 They had a deal that they would keep kind of sending. They would basically share their changes back to LucasArts in exchange for being able to continue using the engine or something like this. So then they made that series of putt-putt games. They made the series of Freddy Fish games. They had a thing called Sly...

4:53 Fox, something like this, some Spy Fox, something like this. I don't remember. And then Pajama Sam 2, right? Pajama Sam. Those are the two that I know. Okay, you just picked all of the ones that I didn't know. No, they're real names. No, they're amazing. Hey, is that HTTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee.

5:11 We order coffee via sshterminal.shop. Yeah, you want a real experience? You want real coffee? You want awesome subscriptions so you never have to remember again? Oh, you want exclusive blends with exclusive coffee and exclusive content? Then check out Kron. You don't know what SSH is? Well, maybe the coffee's not for you.

5:40 Remember how we said we had 45 minutes? Where are we going with the story? This is history of gaming. This is critical. You can't talk about gaming and then be like, I have no idea what Putt-Putt is. What is even no Freddy Fish? Well, if you guys haven't beaten Battletoads, you can't talk about gaming.

5:57 I'm setting up my own goalpost. I know Battletoads. Oh, good. We can all gatekeep. Earthworm. Good. Good. Good. Battletoads was pretty hard. I only got to play it at France. We never had a NES, rather, at NES. I didn't realize you pronounced it with a Z. That's unique. NES. I just say Nintendo. Yeah.

6:15 Anyway, continue with the setup. So what are we talking about? We're talking about some guy made a tweet. Okay, so yes, today, well, it's spawned. It is all spawned off from a guy making a tweet, which is rather silly, which he said something along the lines of this right here. In fact, we can bring it up, which says, I'm pretty sure gaming as a category is dead because everyone is just going to build their own games.

6:39 Games don't have ongoing maintenance costs. Everyone can kind of just generate it. Now, I mean, I'm sure just like a lot of you, that might have seemed a little silly. I don't think that that is going to be the case. I don't think everybody's just going to generate games just like not everybody's going to be a programmer, even if programming was for Freezy.

6:57 And so, of course, I was not about that. I'm like, I don't think so. I think it's not necessarily that. And he said the game doesn't even have to be good. That's not what people just want to be able to play whatever games. Playing the agent is the game, of course. And I found that to be a little bit ridiculous, but I started thinking about it.

7:13 And then this is his kind of final point, which is billions of people would rather AI chat than read a book. People would rather play an agent, not play a traditional prepackaged game. Now, there's a lot more to this, and I was just trying to give the best walkthrough of his top-level points. But this really spawns off.

7:32 Is gaming going to be dead? Are we seeing a revolution in gaming? And since we have legendary game developer Casey Muratori, I thought this would be a good time to talk about A little bit about that. Is it actually possible that gaming can, in fact, be dead? I mean, I guess the problem primarily here is just that I think the person is kind of making a very strange leap of...

7:59 a business like leap from something that is just an aspect, something that could happen to some people, right? It's the way I would say it. The first thing to understand is like, people don't play and buy or buy and play prepackaged games as the primary revenue generator in games anymore. Anyway, So this is kind of very antiquated thinking.

8:23 What he's talking about already happened. It's called like Fortnite and Roblox and stuff like this. And Minecraft. It's already, already gaming moved on from what this person is thinking of. And already provides the thing that this person is thinking of. Specifically... that you can have these sort of like inexpensive, not particularly customizable, whatever experiences that people just kind of make.

8:51 But the thing this person is missing is what people actually wanted to do is be with their friends and share them with their friends and experience them. And gaming already made those things, and they already account for revenue. So they sort of had a semi-good idea in this tweet if they had had it...

9:08 15 years ago or whatever the game industry already did all this and the only degree to which ai will really affect this is you know those platforms like a roblox like fortnite and so on you will probably see the ability to use employ ai increasingly much in platforms like this to make different kinds of content i've literally heard And I don't know why it has not been produced yet, but I've literally heard people at companies, very prominent game companies, explain things like, we can see that there will probably be a thing that's like sort of tick tock, where you can kind of quickly go through games that are very brief and small and things like that.

9:54 So all of this stuff is already known. I don't think it will have pretty much any effect on gaming as a category, except possibly like in the much smaller, like if we're talking about indie games and how it affects that or something like in the much, much, much lower, less significant part of the revenue stream.

10:14 um so so hold on i just have to take a quick step back you know i just realized something unreal engine is you could call it a game for developing games yes and then it made fortnight which is a game where you can develop games is fortnight a self-hosted compiler yet do you build fortnight do you build fortnight with fortnight yet No, they're making Verse, right?

10:38 They've got a sick programming language going on there. You don't yet, Prime, but I feel like... Well, what I can say is that the... There is sort of like Unreal Engines in Unreal Engines and stuff. I feel like there's things like the Epic Store has like Unreal Engines bundled in it for launching things that have Unreal Engine in it.

11:01 So you're not far, but I don't think... literally what you want, maybe not yet. But they'll get there. They'll get there, Prime. I do think there's a lot, because we've kind of already immediately went straight into what is called friendship slop. Now, there's a lot of debate on what exactly friendship slop is.

11:19 Fortnite is, Casey said Fortnite. Fortnite is not friendship slop. Fortnite is not friendship slop Fortnite started friendship slop You have to figure it out by context And then you're going to give us a definition later Like you're actually at a stand up at work And you don't want to look stupid So you're not along Until you have enough context to guess What the context is At the end of the meeting That's what we've been talking about You have to make meaningful contributions as well along the way So it also looks like you're listening and paying attention So it's really going to be different Oh my god That makes sense.

11:54 That does make sense. But TJ, I would argue that Fortnite was the original friendship slop. I might say that the slop part is a little bit perhaps unfair there because it is very fully built out. So the like the slop part of friendship slop often, if you actually look at the titles, the slop part is kind of a little more apt oftentimes.

12:20 I mean, I agree. I'm not really arguing with what you're saying, but I just want to kind of throw that in there. Okay. The reason why is that because this was like 2018, 2019 when it exploded and really came on the scene. When you started streaming. Yeah, right after I started streaming or no, right before I started streaming is when it exploded because I started streaming Fortnite.

12:44 Friendship Slot? Say that again. What was exploding? Friendship Slot? Are you even paying attention? I'm trying to get context on what Friendship Slot is. Trash, we'll explain shortly. Don't worry, because we're going to have an argument about it. We should just have the argument about it now. But the rise of these AI games is really they're going to be for friendship slop, I assume.

13:10 Right? Which is just, you know, games in which you – I'll just explain it now. At least my definition, which probably is different than TJ's, which is games in which the primary purpose is for you to develop and continue your friendship with other people, not necessarily the game itself. So I might just, like, this is the same as my comment before.

13:32 I would say that that is just a social game. To really be friendship slop, it also kind of has to be a fairly low effort production. Okay. That's the only thing. Because that's the reason I think Fortnite doesn't quite qualify. Because it's like there's just too much production value. So the slop. We tend to say friendship slop.

13:53 But usually you look at the game. It's like these crappy textures on low rent geometry. With like character models that are kind of crappy. And there's like not much in it. That's kind of, you know. So I don't know. I don't want to make too big of a case of it. But that's my feeling anyway. I would say I agree more with Casey.

14:13 I also think, unfortunately, lately the term, I feel like just goes for any game that's multiplayer, which is crazy because you're like – Some games are good and they have multiple people playing. I don't understand. But, like, I would say a key feature of the genre is there's no point playing at all by yourself.

14:32 So, like, Fortnite people play by themselves. And, like, I mean, like, as in not with their friends. They, like, solo queue. Right. Like, you wouldn't play... like, I don't know, big, the big walk or whatever the game is a bunch of people playing, like some of these other ones, like, which I'm not saying that's why I like, I don't like necessarily the turn from slot.

14:50 Cause then it's like, Oh, the game's bad. I don't know, whatever. But like, uh, I would say a defining characteristic has to be that you cannot play solo. Like, as in, you cannot just turn your computer on and go play. That's a terrible game if that's the case. It's probably... There's fun games like that.

15:08 I think we need to have some friendship slop. Well, we should play Mecha Chameleon together right after this. Dude, we have to play that game. trash that's whatever that's i think it's probably one of those things where the the uh the term kind of takes on a life of its own because we didn't have a term for this before it's like it's like vibe coding like vibe coding was originally supposed to be only referring to ai coding where you just weren't really checking anything and you were just kind of like typing in some prompts and letting it do whatever and now people just use vibe coding to mean that you used an ai even if you were like I made all these test suites and I read all the codes, like it's still vibe coded or whatever.

15:48 Right. It just kind of made, it was just a term for that thing. Now friendship slop kind of seems to be doing that. It's kind of like, Hey, it's not really slop necessarily. It might be, but it might also just be this really well-made game that I'd play with my friends that I still called it friendship slop.

16:02 Right. Right. Time out, time out. So the, So friendship slop, is that just like some term some random person made up for just like a shitty multiplayer game? I don't know who made it. I don't know who coined it. Like where does this come from? It's entered into the ethos of online discourse about multiplayer games.

16:21 And now it's just a word that people use. But is it implying like it's an AI multiplayer game? It does a little bit, but I feel like people are sort of insinuating that you used AI to crank it out in no time at all. But also then it's getting the line is getting blurred now because they're doing it for games that are obviously not like they were made before.

16:43 It's definitely applied to games that nobody is arguing were made with AI. Okay. I would like to say. It is notable though. Zanus just put a Wikipedia link for it. So it's more notable than Odin. So we do need to make sure that we give our dues here. The friend slop. I saw Ginger Bill in the chat. Ginger Bill, you aren't notable, but friendship slop is in fact notable.

17:05 How does it feel? Yeah. How does it feel? What are the references? What are the high-quality references? Oh, great point. Can we scroll to the bottom? In that Wikipedia article. I'm doing it. I'm scrolling to the bottom for you. I want to see what it says. You know, did we get a Wired article in there?

17:22 It might be a Wired article. Holy to moly. Let's see. Yeah, so this is by... From something called Glizzy, whatever that is. What the hell? super jump magazine super jump magazine these might as these might as well be the oxford english dictionary i mean let's be honest here true the highest quality references cripe michael friend have french french slop used to be a derogatory term but hits like gamble with your friends after changing the narrative ign okay that's ign though Whoa.

17:59 So here he is IGN to cover... We just need IGN to cover Odin, and then we're done. Yes. Also kind of funny, because Polygon gets a reference. IGN does not. Is IGN not a real thing? Is it not considered citable? I don't know. Ryan has a great point. This is... It's something like International Gaming News or something like that.

18:21 I don't remember. Internet Gaming News, probably. Never knew. Never knew. I do like this idea that none of us know what something is that we've said a thousand times. I like how Ryan is springing up right now. In-game name. Okay. What? No, that's just an acronym, bro. Fine. You just got bamboozled. You just got boomer.

18:43 Put Gemini down and actually try to find the answer. This guy just listens to the LLM no matter what. It was launched in September 29th, 1996, and it originally stood for Imagine Games Network. Okay. We were totally wrong. That sounds awful. Imagine games. Bro, you just got search slopped so hard. That's crazy.

19:03 So much search slop going on. Dude, I can't tell anymore, okay? It's like 99% AI overviews. And when you think you escape AI overviews, you scroll down one section. It's a new section of AI overviews, okay? So it's like it double whammies you every time. I wish they would stop putting that AI overview up there because Gemini is just not very good.

19:23 And that's not even that's the like quickest thing that Gemini can do to like it's not it didn't go away and think for 15 minutes and then come up with it. It's just like, I don't know, bro. Here we go. This is what we cash. Like, here's the cash result for this thing. Good luck. I wish they'd stop. It's so bad.

19:44 I had it. We were driving to an amusement park, me and my family, and I asked, I think this was close to last fall, and we're driving. And I was wondering, when does this park close? Michigan Adventures. It's an okay amusement park. Not as good as Cedar Point for those out there in the Midwest, but it's okay.

20:04 And I was like, when does it close? And it goes, oh, it's already closed. It closes on October 10 or something like this, some random date, whatever, in the future. And it wasn't that date yet. But it was just telling me, when you get there today, the season's already over. I'm like, I already bought tickets, bro.

20:21 Like, Gemini, what are you doing? Yeah. Have you ever seen National Lampoon's Vacation? It's like that. Oh, hell yeah. Several times. Going to Wally World, Teej. Yeah. There's like five. We're going to force him to ride rides with us. Okay. So we literally have nothing to talk about on the standup. We're done.

20:44 We finished. That was it. Right. I think we're done. I had some more to say. False. Yeah. First time also has other questions. Can we do more on that? And then not only that. More on that. Casey. But I don't know if you know this here, Holm. I mean, it's very difficult to do this switching back and forth.

21:03 But if we jump in here, we also have this topic. Is vibe coding a game? A game. I mean, it's definitely an activity, right? And if you look back again, for those who don't know gaming history, which is apparently everyone, the even extremely. I can see how far you looked down on me just then. That was like the first I've ever seen you look down.

21:25 Yeah. I can't even like I don't know where you are relative to me in the like panel of people here, but I would look straight down if you were. That's where I am for me right now. Like the Brady Bunch. Oh, man. Like this. We have to have a Brady Bunch intro. What are we doing? So just to put some icing on that particular cake.

21:46 As early as like the C64 era, so we're talking like early 80s, there was a game shipped called Gary Kitchen's Game Maker. And Gary Kitchen was the guy who made like Pitfall, if you've ever heard of that game. I did, yes. There's probably one or two other notable games by him too, but they're escaping my memory right now.

22:08 But obviously Pitfall is a pretty big one. And he shipped a game called Game Maker, which is literally just a set of tools you can use that make a game that you can play. And it was literally like the precursor to something like actual Game Maker or Unity. Go look it up if you've never seen it before.

22:29 Running on a C64 in 64K of memory. Dang. Dang. And you could make little sprites and like a little sprite editor. You could make little sounds and like a sound editor. And you could, you know, put in some simple logic. Literally all of this was done with a joystick. Like it was like you'd pick little logic statements and stuff like that.

22:50 And then you made a game. Some people like to do this. It's some percentage of the population. It's not the majority. Most people would rather experience a game made by somebody else. It doesn't really matter how easy it is. Some people will like that kind of game quote, and some people won't. And that probably won't change with AI.

23:12 You said this is with C64, right? Yeah. How was there a C64 when C was created in 1992 slash 1993 at Bell Laboratories? Right. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem possible. Checkmate. There's C99. I totally get that. But C64, I think you just made that up. Shouldn't it be called the Algon. Well, there's C17.

23:30 Yeah. Got him. There's C17. Yes, there's always... That's the thing is there's always been... Okay, fun side quest. There's this game called Graal or Graal, G-R-A-A-L, online. And it was this game that was... I think it even got threatened to be sued, but it had the original Zelda Super Nintendo... art in it if I'm not mistaken or it had some level of that and it was originally uh coined as like Zelda online this was in like 1997 and then it had to be renamed and in it there was a level editor where you could actually learn to do some basic programming and all that and that's actually how I got started programming was through something like that but almost nobody I knew who played it touched the pro of the game, the, the level editor.

24:14 So you could make anything you wanted and you could program things, but nobody actually does it. And so when I hear like, will vibe coding games be a game? Sure. I mean, you could, you could argue that it will be a game and maybe it'll be made in such a way that things like fortnight, you could just sit with your friends, jump on your microphone and be like, okay, fortnight, I want you to make us this kind of level because we're going to want to battle in it.

24:33 And it's going to be like, and boom, you're now playing it. Right. And so it's like, is vibe coding a game, actually a game. I don't think it's necessary. I think it'd be, it's just like a condition into making an experience in an already established game at best. I'm just doubting that people or the general population is going to be like, Oh, you know what?

24:51 I don't want to play games. I want to go and vibe code games. Cause that's what everybody's going to do because it's cheap and fun. And it's going to be, it's just like, we're all going to have a great time. Is it cheap? Hmm. And by the way, that little side story with Grawl, I went to an event and he runs like this high school hack club, a big one that was at OpenSauce.

25:10 And the person who helps run it, he learned how to program using Grawl in 2008. And I learned how to do it in 1998. Same game, same level editor, slightly different. And it was like one of like 300 people in the world who learned how to program from that one game. And we high fived together. It was great.

25:29 I was four. I'm playing Grawl right now. you are oh yeah apparently you can play on the web i'm playing right now i think it's still alive if i'm not mistaken yeah there there was 1500 graalians online when i just checked really i don't even know what i'm doing but i'm playing this means people can still learn to program even today with crawl they can the only acceptable form of learning how to program Trash, I'm interested in your thoughts.

25:58 Have you attempted to vibe code any games? I actually have attempted to vibe code like 20 games, like behind the scenes. I try all the time. So I'm like, I have an idea for a game while I'm cooking. I'm like, this is such a good game. So actually I have one game I was to tell you about. I tried to do this dig simulator where we could race.

26:15 Wait, can you say that again? What'd you just say? I tried to vibe code a game called Dig Simulator. Okay, I thought you said Dig Simulator. Oh, I could do that too. Maybe I did that. So just imagine us for... That's called x.com. Yeah. I thought it was his receipts app. I mean, that's... That's the other one.

26:34 So hold on, time out. I want to tell you about this. This is a great idea. Yeah, go trash, go. I'm so interested. So all four of us basically are sitting in a virtual sandbox. We all get to pick our tools like a fork or a spoon. And we all have to dig to like some specific threshold to see who can get there the fastest kind of thing.

26:49 So I was trying to make this game have like a floating spoon and stuff. It is so hard to get the graphics right with LLM. So that's like my current. So the functionality is typically fine. but it's like the look of it that I just can't get good. Like if you look at all the AI games, they all kind of look the same more or less.

27:05 Some of them look really good, which I don't actually believe. Have you tried hooking up Blender? And then like the only way I've made it look any remotely okay is I hook up some sort of graphical program and I say, hey, you build it and then you have Fable rate you as a AAA harsh game critic. Yeah. Do you actually prompt it like that?

27:26 Yes. You are a triple A CEO. Yes. I'll be like, you rate the models on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being triple A great. And you will not stop until you get a 10 out of 10 from the harsh triple A game critic. And it will generally actually get like after like five hours, you'll get something that looks better.

27:44 But I've also had it to wear it like a golfer. I made a golfing game. Impossible to get it to stand above the ball. It's always. Prime, I have to stop you. I have to stop you. You did not make a golfing game. You made a level editor for a golfing game and did not finish the game. I need that to be out there and in the world.

28:03 That's what happened. I don't know if you know this, but there's been people outside of our little friend group that have played our games. And the only game people loved was my game because you could make your own golf levels and then play your own golf levels. That's just not true because Josh and his family are playing.

28:18 His kids don't count. They're harsh critics, okay? They made fun of us and said they could vibe code better than us when they watched The Tower, okay? All right. Anyway, sorry. Keep going, Trash. Trash, I want to hear more about your game. I don't even know where I was going with it. I don't even know where I was going with it.

28:32 I want to hear more about the games you're making. Your game ideas are great. They are pretty good. Well, I try to make it a way. Sorry. They are pretty good. You had to consider that for a little while, and then you were like, you know what? Yeah, they are. You know what? Prime's right about something.

28:44 Well, because it's like, I try to think about games I would play. And the thing he's right about is how good my game ideas are. I don't want to give you guys all the special sauce because now I need to do the blender thing. And then maybe the digging game will actually be a real thing. Because I was going to make it for some hackathon.

28:57 So I started making all these random games. You started cheating. You're building it for a hackathon, but you're just building it all beforehand. That's literally cheating trash. The definition of cheating trash. I was going to do it for a hackathon, and then clearly I didn't. And then I just started building it myself.

29:13 Because I didn't make it in time. Give us one more idea. Give us one more idea. Well, I was just making my own, like, so, like, my kids love Pokemon, so I was just making my own version of Pokemon. So, like, a variation. Oh, sick. Okay. It actually looks pretty good. I'm not gonna show you it's not ready yet, but I'm making my own Game Boy version, okay?

29:33 Okay? Also- I'm sorry for laughing. Sick. Why are you laughing at me? I'm excited, Trash. I'm both angry. Luckily, the response of every person I've ever met making a vibe-coded game is like, oh, I'm making it, it's awesome. I can't show you yet, it's not ready. It's just like, I've heard that phrase.

29:49 Hey, Prime, have some more Dorya. I already showed Gordoria, okay, tough guy? That's true. Did you ever finish the game? Yeah, at this point, I would call it like effectively feature complete. I just have to make it fun now. Like I have to think about- Just to make it fun? What the fuck does that mean?

30:08 Okay, let me give you an example. That's not how games work. I'm done, but it's not fun. It's not fun. Hold your legendary tongue, Wench. Let me tell you about this, okay? Uh, first off making a game in which has cards and all that and being properly balanced. That's like 99% of the work making the actual tower defense, putting towers down, having them level up, choosing all the different types of upgrades, all that that's easy, but making it so that there's actually like feeling like risk reward suspense, like actual, like, That takes no programming experience effectively, but is infinity hard.

30:46 That is actually the hard part. I have a game, it's just not fun yet. Because I don't know how- Prime, Prime, Prime, we typically call that an engine, not a game. The game is the part you're calling hard. I thought it was, yeah, I thought design. I'm stuck on game design. That's like, that's the harder.

31:02 Yeah, that's the thing that's the game, right? The rest of it is the engine for the game. Okay, well, mine is so crappy, I don't know what the difference between an engine and a game is Casey. The game is very much not done yet, right? Okay, so Pram literally did what I did. He did, he did. You can play it, but it's not fun yet.

31:18 Yeah, exactly. It's so funny. It's not funny, but you're good. You did the part that I do, Prime. You did the part that I typically do. And you can't do the part that I also can't do, which is how to design the game. I actually need help. I need somebody that's good at game design because I have it fully working.

31:35 I have like every hook you need. You can hook into anywhere. Oh, a projectile lands and it's a critical. Boom, you have a callback. You can mutate the stats to like do stuff. You can count. You can do all like you can add. Wow, that sounds really fun. Well, Nick Dobbs would love this game. There's callbacks that he can hook into.

31:56 So he'd be like, that's the game. That's the game of the future is you hook into callbacks. Great point. Set reply with the source code to it. But that means you can do anything now. You can send it to this guy. Effectively, I put Fortnite. Mom, we got callbacks. Yeah, it's all callbacks, baby. It's good.

32:11 I know we're joking here, but just to put a finer point on it, if you can do anything, that's just further evidence that there isn't a game. A game is the absence of all the things that you can't do. It's carving out exactly the space. That's like, this is the set of things that makes this like beautiful organic interaction.

32:31 That's like both fun to do in the small and immediately like easy to grab onto, but sort of infinitely complex. So you can just keep spending time thinking more about it and learning more about how it works and coming up with strategies and so on. Right. That's why my digging game is going to be a number one hit.

32:49 Okay. Your digging game is Friendship Slop. I'm not sure how that followed, but okay. Your game is Friendship Slop, Trash. His game did sound like Friendship Slop. Imagine we all had a fork. We had five minutes to dig as much as we could with a fork. You can do different strategies. You can scoop. Friends Slop.

33:04 Like, how would you do it? That's a Friends Slop game right there. Yep. Yep, Friends Slop. Dude, what if this time next year I'm like a booleaner because of this game? Trash. If we... But there's ways for us, after we dig, we can turn what we've... dug out into money and buy bigger forks and do other stuff right you could you know because that wait hold wait tj are you suggesting we dig up like valuable items to the cell right like we dig up gold yep yeah right and then we can get bigger stuff and eventually you can get all the way up to like bucket wheel excavator you know what i'm saying and we're just out there operating bucket wheel excavators one of the largest machines on earth and that would be fun trash now we're talking see

33:47 My game is fun. Tell him. I will say in prime's defense, he recognizes that he has a lot of work left on more Doria. So even though we're memeing right now, I will give him a little bit. I'll, I'll help him out a little bit here. We're, we're aware. We're aware of the status, but he's making progress.

34:04 But, but, but at this point it is like, it is complete in some sense. It's just the hardest part, which this is my whole reason why I think people aren't going to vibe code their games is exactly this experience I'm having is why it's not fun. It's because you can make everything you need, like because if my game is rather simple, it's not like I need to be a legendary game programmer to make this work.

34:25 I went and used flame graphs to see how much like time. 60% of the time I'm waiting for the next game tech at 60 frames a second on a debug build. It's just like, I'm not even doing anything. It's just like hanging out there. Very, very simple. No talent needed to build this actual game. But. if I could vibe code that in one day, it would still take me two years to really figure out how to make the game actually like ultra fun.

34:53 And so no one's going to build, like no one's going to, no one's going to do that. That's not fun. And so it has to be like a completely different type of game that this works on. But then how can you really make that a fun, consistent experience? Like how, cause even that would become boring because it becomes the same thing.

35:09 Eventually it becomes so cookie cutter that these fun generative games are the same game, just with different skins on. I'm just I just don't buy it. I just don't. I currently don't buy it. I think the you are correct. And the different type of game part of it is like just imagine in your head that you have tick tock, but everything that comes up is like trash is thing where it's like dig with the fork real quick.

35:35 And you dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig for like 15 seconds. And then you scroll to the next game. Right. It's not it's not actually something that's actually all that like doesn't have any longevity or whatever. And then those just kind of the algorithm ranks those everyone's vibe coded game that you can only really play for 30 seconds.

35:54 But that's fine because it's the tick tock of games. That's what it will look like. Right. Right. It won't be like you said, because in order to the producing the thing is not the hard part. It was finding something new that's in a very rare space, which AIs kind of are uniquely bad at finding for you is is the hard part.

36:15 But that's not necessarily what you would be building for this category in the short term. In the five-year horizon where you're just having these AI slop games, it would be more like a TikTok experience. And again, not taking over all of gaming, but it would be a platform that someone could maybe make money on because people would just do that and they just kind of scroll through that or whatever.

36:40 you so what you're trying to tell me is that there is a there is a non-zero market for uh a mario party like friendship slop game in which people can stream together and play generative little one-off difficulties potentially and it'd be hard to expand beyond that Well, it's not so much I'm saying hard or easy to expand beyond.

37:02 I'm more saying that the places where people are imagining that AI would somehow make some new category that's bigger or that's a different thing, that's a more complicated thing, we already built. Those things exist. They're like Fortnite. They're like whatever. We have them. They're out there. So you're not really creating a new category by using it.

37:22 But there is a new category that you could see being created in the short term by this, which is just, yeah, WarioWare basically as a much better. bigger revenue stream like right now warioware does not capture much uh revenue by by volume right if you just looked at like warioware is this tiny little sliver in a gigantic game revenue pile you could see tiktok for gaming which is just warioware with ai generated slop as being a bigger revenue generator from advertising it wouldn't be because anyone would buy it because no one would buy any of this stuff But it's like it would be a significant thing, just like TikTok is, right?

37:59 It makes money. I assume. I actually don't know. I don't know the market of TikTok, but I assume they make a significant money out of advertising or whatever. Now I just want to build this just so we can have competitions. Like when TJ's giving me lip and I'm like, I'm your boss. And he's like, no, I'm the boss.

38:14 And I'm like, take it to the, take it to the court. And we jump on Tik TOK for gaming. We play three mini games and we determine who CEO that day. Yep. I do like that. I was thinking there's gotta be like, we're not that far away from being able to do something where it's Mario party. But then like when you set up, a party you can like type everybody types in like 10 different random things and then the ai just like smushes them together into like a bunch of random random mini games and you get surprised by like the games that come up and then what i would do is if we had multiplayer for this i would save which ones people liked and didn't like and then we could do some rlhf on this bad boy and then before you know it we could be inserting ads inside of those subtly and making a trillion do we have a billion dollar business right now just made a billion dollar idea and honestly these are so let's start the repo ideas

39:02 trash i think i saw a black mirror about this trash here's the problem is that we're all gonna leave secretly making our own billion dollar company after this we're gonna be about 15 prompts in being like you're a horse it's not critic the thing is these are not like everyone who's already thought of this is my point like the game companies already know this right yeah they're all thinking of exactly what this would look like right now not us yeah oh you think zelnick ceo of take two that has managed to make hundreds of billions of dollars is smarter than me he only got like as a nepotism idiot i'm the smart guy right I know.

39:41 It's true. We're the smart people on this podcast. Game developers don't know shit. They don't know shit. That's why people come here is for our really smart takes and knowledge. To be fair, there has also been some tragically bad games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So not all game developers are, in fact, good.

39:59 That's true. that's true no and and that's why i'm saying this idea is not that good because i'm like everyone's already had it and they're not that bright guys it didn't do it better than me i'm gonna do it better that's why i'm gonna win i worked at netflix casey i have ideas okay okay okay okay okay Uh, the, the other thing I would point out is like, because we are so smart on this podcast, which I think we just demonstrated with all of these ideas, uh, where is our like premium subscription newsletter that costs like $2,000 a month that for like analysis or what it like, you know what I'm talking about?

40:35 Like what are those like premium, like analyst newsletters that we're going to tell you like what's up kind of a thing. Right. Like, you know what I'm saying? Good idea. I like that. It's going to keep the ideas going. We need that. We need even more enhanced or something like that. Where we like AI generate like a thing that talks about the state of the market.

40:58 Casey, do you want to market enhanced? Do you want to make a subcompany called software enhanced? Right. Where we talk about all of this. Yes. Yes, exactly. Like the Gartner hype cycle and things like that. Like all of that stuff. We need to be into that. Where's the stand-up hype cycle and things like that?

41:17 And graphs, like those four sector graphs, which is where they just clearly just place dots wherever they wanted. There's no actual data. They just put dots where they think they should go on like some hypothetical axis. We could do that. We can make that graph. That's not true. Microsoft is leading innovation, Casey.

41:35 Okay. Based on the Gartner graph, Microsoft, is out competing aws in ai innovation of course i mean i just i have to stop us really quick and just read an insane chat message that is like an off shoot of the tiktok for gaming idea which was just popular court this is from c17er a tiktok like experience where watchers get to decide the case that's just such an channels and voting on whether guilty or not guilty that's so insane i just had to surface it for everybody else so such a bad idea could get some air time love it it's such a bad idea i like it all right uh and c17 just got banned okay now the end all right oh man All right, so I think that that's effectively all we're going to talk about.

42:27 I'm not going to lie to you, though. I do think there is really something to this, like, this TikTok of game thing. It's just that you have to purely make it so social that you have to, like, include Twitch chat as a part of it or all this. So you just really get... you know, a whole bunch of people playing it and, you know, experiencing, there could be something there.

42:46 Exactly the same fallacy that the guy who said the tweet that gaming is dead right now, which is that, well, since I like doing things with Twitch chat and we do stuff together and it makes the experience fun, other people will do the same thing. Oh, I know. Don't worry. I understand that. I'm a fallacy machine.

43:07 Yeah. Okay. That's good. I just want to make sure. I think the thing just like overall for this whole like vibe coding games thing, it is like I have fun doing it. Like I'm having fun. I'm making a few like I made a fun putt-putt game for our team and some other stuff. I'm working on a fishing game. Not Puppet Save the Zoo, though, sorry.

43:28 Prime said your game sucks. Yeah, your game sucks. Yeah, that's because mine was in 3D, and he's like, the only Puppet games that are good are Stickman Golf, and then he made his, and he still couldn't get the physics right for the ball to go into the hole in a 2D game. 2D games are extremely difficult physics, okay?

43:43 Not like 3D games are easy. It's 2D games that are actually extremely difficult. Okay. So. Because you have one less D to work with, guys. Like, you're missing an entire D. How can you get the physics to work without that D? I'm not missing a D, Casey. Casey. Yeah. The D simulator as a trash was talking about earlier.

44:04 I'll make it deal. But like, I recognize that I'm a kind of guy that enjoyed like tinkering with Neil of him and having fun on Linux, but like before LLMs. So, so it's like, it doesn't, it, I don't think it translates really at all. And people who like get this into their head are getting a little confused about what things they think are fun versus what thing everyone is fun.

44:24 And it's like, I think that's really the, the big thing. for it and i would say gaming's probably not that i'm gonna go out there on a limb and i'm gonna throw it out there i'm gonna stake that it's not that um i you know me living in rapid city south dakota not known as a a luscious tech hub i have yet to meet one person that was like yo i like being on a computer so i Perhaps I'm in a bit of an echo chamber, but I just somehow doubt that all these people are going to be like, I'm going to make my own game now.

44:59 What do they like to do? They like drinking. They like playing games. They like going out to eat. They like hiking. Nature stuff, touching grass, shooting things, fishing things, boating. When I was riding down the trail, a person came up on their horse and said to me, I like vibe coding. My agents are working right now.

45:24 Do you know what my wife calls it? Dude, my wife walked into my office and went, no. Even my horse got an agent. Working on carrots. Oh, sorry. My stuff froze there for a second. What does your wife say? My wife walked in the other week. Maybe I told this story before, but she was like, are you jive coding?

45:41 What? Because she heard the term on Instagram or something. She's like, is that jive coding? And I was like, oh my god. Why isn't there something called jive coding? A disco ball fell from the ceiling. I put on disco shoes. I was like, yeah. Why isn't there something called jive coding? Someone needs to make something called jive coding right now.

46:01 It's a thing now. Yeah, just put some sunglasses, get some funky music going on, and you've got jive-coding. We jive-coding. What does it mean? I don't know. It's a feeling. It doesn't matter what it means. It's provocative. Okay. Great point. We're going to have to end this here. Thank you, everybody, for watching this stand up on is the future of gaming, making games, is friendship slop in there, all that fun stuff.

46:26 I hopefully you learn some amazing things. And this is all for today. Everybody say goodbye. Bye. Bye. Boot up the day. Vibe code and errors on my screen. Terminal copy and hand.