I've tried a few game projects with coding agents - having never worked on a game before in my life - and the main thing I learned is that the hard part is designing it to be fun.

Coming up with a genuinely interesting gameplay loop with increasing difficulty levels and progressively revealed gameplay mechanics is a fascinating and extremely difficult challenge, no matter how much AI you throw at the problem.

And that's why human work, not its "expression" or some other legalese should be protected by law.

If LLMs (or other "AI" or even AI tools) are able to exactly replicate the behavior of a program (game or otherwise) without access to its source code, that's technologically cool. However, that means it's possible to cheaply replicate immense amounts of human work in a way the law does not cover.

If you take a game and use LLMs to reimplement both its assets and code from scratch but players have the same movement, weapons do the same damage, have the same spread and projectile speed, and so on, then the "new" game is not really new, it's based on other people's work. And nobody should be allowed to profit from other people's work without their consent and without compensating them.

Obviously, work is hard to quantify but that doesn't mean we should give up.

Does that argument also apply to https://www.freeciv.org/ and https://openxcom.org/ and similar projects?

1) Yes but in those cases what their authors are gaining is at best some public recognition, not money. And because the projects don't hide what they're based on, that recognition goes back to the original games and their authors. Now, if they were asking for donations, then yes, I think they should give a part of it to the original devs.

2) We can also look at it from a more utilitarian perspective. When something starts as closed source, people who made it got paid already and the owners (who often did not perform any useful work except putting in money) keep making money from then on. Reimplementing it as open source does not harm the original devs but allows more people to access it and it also often leads to a much more open and pro-social implementation without dark patterns. And the paid version often still has an advantage due to existing awareness, marketing and network effects.

OTOH when something starts as free/open under conditions such as anyone building on top of it has to release under the same conditions, then a company taking that work is violating explicitly stated wishes, is making money which doesn't reach the original devs and does not promote the original work. And it also has the aforementioned advantages. When the closed version eclipses the open one, the owners are free to add dark patterns and otherwise exploit their position further.

This way open work is a global social good, closed work is only good for those who own it.

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I prefer argument 1 because it doesn't require the presence of exploitative power structures.

Either way, we should recognize there are multiple dimensions to compensation - here recognition and money. And work should be rewarded along both axes transitively.

A friend who does game design gave me a good tip -- start with the core game loop first and only focus on that with low poly / representative shapes for game elements that you can refine in the future. Not until the core game loop is fun does it make sense to spend a minute of time on any other aspect of the game.

I have very similar experience. I vibecoded a foreign language practice app for myself. It works decent from functional perspective and I don’t see too many bugs. But the biggest productivity constraint I see is the time I need to spend using it in order to understand what is working and where the issues are.

My newest joke is:

„I was able to vibecode those 5 apps I always wanted but never had time to code them myself … it is so different now because — I don’t have time to use them”.

That is wrong - the limit isn't time. The limit is you need to create a good ui so you don't need time. time is the limit for a fun game (see other comnents on how hard this is).

However an app needs to be a good enough ui that it does something for you and often they don't. Paper todo lists still beat all the todo apps people try to make because the ui works for paper. Paper has large limits and so it seems there must be an app out there that is better - but so far everyone has failed to create it.

I think you didn't get the joke.

Idea behind the joke is that those apps were not needed at all in the first place, it is only that person from the joke had grand idea lurking in their head that those will be super useful. If those apps would be needed a person would take time to build them. Now building useless apps costs much less.

Better UI doesn't matter if something is purely a "wannabe application" in someones head.

Ergo, if you don't have time to build out some idea - that is a clear indication such idea is not good or not so useful - even if you still have an urge to build it, subconsciously you already know.

LMK if you finish it, sounds like something my daughter would enjoy!