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That's what I think about many video games! Given that RPGs were never my forte, but I have played enough games. I've even played enough of recent-ish titles.
Take any Bethesda game or probably most other open-world titles. They all have mountains of generic filler called content that doesn't get cut despite being generic filler. The content doesn't get cut, because it needs to be there. Players like wandering into an interaction and they like doing the thing. That's the appeal. Developers can reward players with do-the-thing-get-thing reward and writers reward players to do the thing because they've become invested in some story or consequence behind it. A great game rewards a player with a dopamine did-thing-got-thing and it rewards the player with an engaging story. There are not very many great games and there's only so many opportunities for great writing in a given game.
In Starfield, there's a common loop. Player meets character NPC. Player may have up to 4 distinct interactions with the character. Possibly one or two of those interactions have 2 different variations. The player is provided with a few sentences of backstory in some way, then the player is expected to recognize the shape of a familiar story and fill in the blanks. These storytelling opportunities come a few phases translated to video game format:
There's nothing in there that can't be improved upon by a writer working with an LLM. If nothing else, this results in the player being provided the opportunity to add depth to a bland and boring A-B experience. The generic shape of the story, where the player is expected to recognize it to fill in the blanks, gets more filling.
Starfield is a bad game, but Starfield had so many of these generic fetch quests, generic storylines, generic dialogues that I don't think I got close to finish it. And hey, I know this developer, I expect some level of generic human slop, but boy did it seem bad. On the other side I've also played most of Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 is a much higher quality game. As I understand it's considered a generational class of game. My generation of this genre would be The Witcher 3 which, as I recall, had relatively rich stories and writing in part. There's still plenty of bland, formulaic, or marginal content that wouldn't be harmed by curated robot slop.
Now I could not be aware of the new fangled indie RPGs true gamers play these days, but I have played enough games to know the writers phone it in no more than a good prompt. That may be due to a workload as is typical for the industry or it might be that video game writers write games for a reason other than greatness. In either case I bet there's a use case for this now. Today! Someone could go find banal interaction in a game, feed a few prompts, and get something that enriches that experience. No question in my mind. AI will not single-handedly create a cohesive BG3 story board and 100 hours of dialogue in one go, but even a free model can help a mediocre writer enrich their 15 minute mini-story side quest #121.
I was thinking of adding some caveats more or less for what you’ve mentioned. Games that aspire to create extremely vast world’s for the sole purpose of escapism, games that focus more on modularity and repetition than complex storytelling, games that have some sort of unique visionary use of AI in mind.
And I could see content created by writers who make use of AI being OK as well. The artist can compensate for the AI‘s weaknesses while using it selectively as a specialized, rather than all purpose, tool. As AI does have some strengths, mainly as a search tool. It’s hugely deficient if you ask it to be creative though, and I don’t believe it’s doing much more than merely copy pasting content from its database.
In any case, I resisted this impulse on the basis that most of this stuff seems either degenerate or a suspect.
Funnily enough, I was thinking exactly of the Elder Scrolls as a series that in some cases has produced slop content of a hugely superior calibre to AI. I speak of Morrowind here. There is no way AI by itself would ever come up with exceptional banalities like three naked Nord barbarians who’ve been identically robbed by witches or dirt farmers giving you the exact same encyclopaedic digressions on regional geography anytime you ask. AI can give you banalities all right, but not of any variety that suggests an underlying meaning or humour to it. These aren’t examples of genius, but they are examples of the kind of colour and charm that humans will give you even in the service of creating slop, and in both cases, they work not just as bland content, but as stuff that enhances the actual quality of the game. AI can’t resist reverting to the generic, so it would entirely come down to human creators to invent these sorts of bizarre outputs. In fact, in many cases I think it’s the twists and turns of the creative processes themselves that humans have to go through that leads them down these unlikely avenues. Case in point, the absurdity in these examples was a direct product of what humans had to do to try and overcome their material limitations.
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