It’s not a revelation to hear that a system built to regurgitate what already exists may, in fact, have trouble coming up with something truly original. When a legendary game developer argues that a genre-defining game could never be made by artificial intelligence, it’s still worth pulling up a chair.
If you’re a PC gamer, you may know Chet Faliszek as one of the key writers behind Valve franchises like Left 4 Dead and Half-Life. While Faliszek left the company in 2017, the game industry veteran has since become a prolific TikTok personality. In a video uploaded on Thursday evening, Faliszek was asked by a fan if he could think of any game design decision that might not have happened if someone at Valve called in sick one day. His answer was a treatise on the limitations of AI that also pulled back the curtain on the development of a seminal video game.
Faliszek brings up AI in this context because he feels that gaming executives see it as an “idea generator” that can help developers come up with concepts and prototypes quickly — which could theoretically come in handy if a human is out sick. Design, he argues, isn’t a “point” that one can simply arrive at. It’s a “line,” he says, where creativity becomes a human process of repeatedly trying and failing to do something.
Team Fortress 2, he reminds people, began as a military shooter whose identity changed multiple times. Much of what’s in TF2 now seems obvious, Faliszek argues, but the development was anything but. Even the basic question of who the characters are and why they’re there was an arduous one.
“Are they brothers fighting on a farm in the Midwest?” he asked. “Are they clones?”
Answering that question did not hinge on the ability to generate more ideas quickly. It was “working through” the ideas and struggling with them that led to a better game.
“Trying to decide, how stupid can they be? Like the Soldier is the stupidest — ‘Hey, I’m all surrounded on all three sides.’ That was a day of arguing about that line.”
An AI could have just told Valve, hey, make him a dense American — but the idea, by itself, wasn’t what made it good. It was having people from different departments considering and massaging smaller details that allowed Valve to understand the game it was making. The specificity that helped TF2 stand apart came from everyone “showing the work,” Faliszek says. It was not just someone yelling out an idea that sounded good and running with it.
One of the things that helped Faliszek specifically was totally tertiary: at the time, he was working on episodes of an apocalyptic TV show that never panned out. That experience — and inability to make the first idea work — eventually led to the “Meet the Team” shorts that helped popularize TF2.
“To think, you’re going to short circuit that part of the creation process with AI? You’re going to concept or prototype early on with AI, and then you’re gonna build your billion-dollar franchise on that? No! No! Oh my god.”
The video is nearly 10 minutes long, and it’s full of smaller tidbits that will interest Valve fans — Faliszek cheekily references a few minor things that apparently may not be public about TF2. It’s totally worth watching in full if you have the time.
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