The Standup with ThePrimeagen - Is Vibe Coding a Game?

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

We dive deep into the controversial idea that "gaming is dead" because everyone will soon just build their own games using AI. Joining as always is legendary game developer Casey Muratori to help break down the history of gaming tools, the rise of "Friendship Slop," and whether "vibe coding" can ever truly replace traditional game design.

Hey, welcome to the stand-up. It's, it's, it's, it's, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. It's early. It's early in the morning. I'm, like, a fast asleep. Trash is leaving. He's going away to secret land.

I don't know where. Yeah, Trish, where are you going? I'm going to the conference in Atlanta. Oh, render ATL. Hold on. I leave it. I'm leaving like an out two hours. I haven't moved the ticket over.

Okay, we just got done doing our weekly complain about Riverside. Okay, you didn't even let me get it into in progress. You guys just went so fast. I'll move it over here. We're done now. Okay, we can do the intro trash. Why don't you tell us about what you're doing, trash? Wait, no, I don't know what you did.

Your mic. Wait, Brian, I don't know what you did. Your mic's here two primes. But you're a thousand times louder than you were about five seconds ago. Dude, it's Riverside. I'm a thousand times. No, no, chat is. Chad is like spamming way too dank and a bunch of others up.

That's a different mic. Really? 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, he's destroying that. Okay, well,

I must have pushed a button. I don't know. There you go, Chad. It's back. It's normal. Okay. I'll take the L on this one.

Theory and action. We only have 45 minutes. Start the podcast. I know. Somebody started to watch out. And then they're like, trash, where are you going? And I'm just like, bro, I got to do the intro. 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 KC. Miratory, which is a legendary programmer. where he knows everything. He's going to teach us all the stuff we need to know. Thank you, Casey. 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. They're already, you've already been mythologized. And so you're already like way beyond everything. That time I thought the dragon was awesome. Yeah, sex spiral Casey. 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'm waiting to roll out. That's the sequel to that. So one day it'll happen. Anyway, continue priming.

Okay, well, I did not realize that slugs also have some very fantastic story. 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. Uh, TJ, whatever. DJ co-host, a king of puns, dad of dads. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us. My dad.

I made a put-putt game recently. So that's kind of my game to have his. history so I just wanted to share. Like Put Putt Putt saves the zoo like that? Puttut. No, like Minigolf. I don't know what Puttut. Oh. Oh, sorry. Who is this puttut 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-M-S-C-U-M-M-S-Royation. Anyone? Anyone? I've heard of some of those words. before, but I don't know anything about them. In different context. 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. The guy who basically, like, created the modern point-and-click adventure, Ron Gilbert, okay? And his team, like 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. They left that after making the, after making scum and the tools for it and shipping a bunch of stuff like, you know. They made scrum? The thing we based this podcast on? Oh. No, I know.

I know. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. I know. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. So, uh, they let, they left, they left Lucas Arts at one point and formed a company called humongous entertainment. And that, they, They made, they had a series of games for kids. They made kids games. It was a putt putt saves you.

Using scum, using the engine that they made at LucasArts. 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 Put Putt Putt games. They made the series of Freddy Fish games. They had a thing called Slie Fox, something like this, some spy Fox, something like this. I don't remember. And then Pajamasam 2, right? Pajamasam.

Pajamas. You just picked all of the ones that I didn't know. No, they're real names. No, they're amazing. Hey, is that H-TTP? Get that out of here. That's not how we order coffee. We order coffee via sht terminal dot shop.

Yeah, you want a real experience. You want real coffee. You want awesome subscription 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 has to?

S. H's? Well, maybe the coffee's not for you. Terminal coffee in hand. Live in the... Remember how we said we had 45 minutes? Yeah, go. Where are we going with the story? This is history of gaming. This is very...

This is critical. You can't talk about gaming and then be like, I have no idea what Puppet is. Like, what doesn't even know for any fish. All right. Well, if you guys haven't beaten Battle Toads, you can't talk about gaming. Okay, I'm setting up my own.

Okay. I know Battletoes. Oh, good. We can all gate. Earthworms. Good, good. Yeah. Battle Toads was pretty hard.

I only got to play at first. I never, we never had a NES, rather, at N-E-S, so. Oh, so I didn't realize you pronounced it with a Z. That's unique. Ness. I just say Nintendo. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, continue with the setup. So what are we talking about? We're talking about some guy made a tweet. Okay, so yes. That's true. Well, it's 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. 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. 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, then I found that to be a little bit ridiculous, but I started thinking about it.

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 a play a traditional pre-packaged game. Now, there's a lot more to this. and I was just trying to give like the best kind of walk through of his top level points. But this really spawns off. Is gaming going to be dead?

Are we seeing a revolution in gaming? And since we have legendary game developer Casey Muratoria, I thought this would be a good time to talk about a little bit about that. And 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 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. What he's talking about already happened. It's called like Fortnite and Roblox and stuff like this. Like, 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, you know, customizable, whatever experiences that people just kind of make. 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 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 TikTok where you can kind of quickly go through games that are very brief and small and things

like that. 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. 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 Fortnite, which is a game where you can develop games. Is Fortnite a self-hosted compiler yet?

Do you build Fortnite? Do you build Fortnite with Fortnite yet? No, they're making verse, right? 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, like, 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 for launching things that have Unreal Engine in it. And so you're you're not far.

But I don't think literally what you want, maybe not yet. But they'll get there. They'll get their 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. Fortnite is Casey he said Fortnite Fortnite is not friendship

slot I didn't What is friendship slot? Fortnite is friendship slot. Fortnite started friendship slot. You have to figure it out by context, okay? 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. Oh, got it. At the end of the meeting, got it. That's what we've been talking about. Right. 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. That makes sense. That makes 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 slot part is kind of a little more apt oftentimes. 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, you know,

because this was like, you know, 2018, 2019 when it exploded and really came on the scene. When you started streaming. Yeah, right after I started streaming is, or no, right before I started streaming is when it exploded because I started streaming Fortnite people. What's like, friendship slot?

Well, let's say that again? What was exploding? Friendship Slop? Fortnight. Trash, are you even paying attention? Do you know what? I'm trying to, I'm trying to get context on what friendship 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, right? Which is just, you know, games in which I'll just explain it now, at least my definition, which probably is different than T.J's, which, which is. 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. 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. That's the only thing that's because like, that's the reason I think Fortnite doesn't quite qualify because it's like there's just too much production values to the slop we tend to say friendship slop 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 like that's kind of you know so i 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 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, 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. So like Fortnite people play by themselves. And like, I mean like as a not with their friends. They like, so look you. Right. Like you wouldn't play like, I don't know, the big walk or whatever the game is a bunch of people play.

Like some of these other ones, like which. I'm not saying, that's why, like, I don't like necessarily to turn from Slop, because then it's like, oh, the game's bad. I don't know, whatever. But, like, 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 would be a terrible game, if that's the case. It's probably, well, the, the, they often are. There's fun games like that. Yeah.

Some of the Trash, I think we need to have some friendship slop. Yeah. Well, we should play Mech a Chameleon together right after this. Dude, we have to play that game. trash that's I think it's probably one of those things where 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 type it 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 code. Like, it's still vibe coded or whatever, 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 play with my friends

that I still called it friendship slop, right? Right. But time out, time out. 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. 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, it was possibly to happen. It's definitely applied to games that nobody is arguing. were made with AI.

I would like to say... It is notable, though. Zanuz just put a Wikipedia link for it, so it's more notable than Odin. So we do need to make sure that we... J.R. Do you're going to chat. Gingerbill, you aren't notable, but friendship slop is in fact notable.

How does it feel? Yeah, how does it feel? What are the references? What are these... What are the high quality references? Oh, great point. Can we scroll to the bottom? Wikipedia article.

I'm doing it. I want to see what it says. You know, did we get a wired article in there? Look at this. Holy to holy. Let's see. Yeah, so this is by. From something called glizzy, whatever that is.

Super Jump Magazine. I mean, this is super jump magazine. I like Super Jump magazine. Inverse. 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 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 We just need 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 I don't remember Internet gaming news Probably Because 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 Game name Okay

What No that's just an acronym Bro Prime You just got bamboozled You just got boomer 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.

It's 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. And that's not even, that's the like quickest thing that Gemini can do too. 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. And it's just like, I wish they'd stop. It's so bad. I had it. We were driving to an amusement park, me and my family, and I asked, I think this was last, like 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 like, it's okay. 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. Like, Gemini, what are you doing? Yeah, yeah. It's, have you ever seen National Lampoon's vacation? It's like that. Oh, hell yeah.

Yes, several times. Is there like, going to Wally World, Deage. Yeah. There's like five. We're going to get John Candy. We're going to force him to ride rides with us, okay? So,

uh, we literally have nothing. to talk about on the standup. We're done. That is not true. That was it. Right? I think we're done. I had some more to say. False. Yeah. First of all, can we do more on that? And then not only that. More on that. Casey.

Yeah. But I don't know if you know this here. Hold on me. I, I, it's very difficult to do this switching back and forth. But if we jump in here, we also has, this topic is vibe coding a game, a game. I mean, it's definitely an activity, right? And if you look back, Again, I, 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. 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. Like this. Oh, dude. We have to have a Brady Bunch intro. What are we doing? Just to put some icing on that particular cake, as early as like the C-64 era, so we're talking like early 80s, there was a game shipped called Gary Kitchens game maker.

And Gary Kitchens was the guy who made like Pitfall, if you've ever heard of that game. I didn't, yes. There's probably one or two other notable games by him too, but they're escaping my memory right now. 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. Running on a C64 in 64K of memory. Dang. And you could make little sprites in like a little sprite editor. You could make little sounds and like a sound editor. and you could put in some simple logic.

Literally all of this was done with a joystick. It was like you'd pick little logic statements and stuff like that. 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. You said this is with C64, right? Yeah. How is there C64 when C was created in 1992 slash 1993 at Bell Laboratories? Right. Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't seem possible. 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 C-17. Yeah, got them. There's C-17. Yes, that's always, that's the thing is there's always been, okay, fun side quest.

there's this game called Grawl or Grail, a 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 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 the level editor 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 be like okay fortnight i want you to make us this kind of level because we're going to want to battle in it and it's going to be like boom 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? I don't want to play games. I want to go and vibe code games because 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? And by the way, that little side story with growl, uh, I went to an event and he runs like this high school hack club, a big one that was at OpenSauce. 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. I was four. I'm playing Grawl right now. You are?

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 was 1,500 grailians online when I just checked. Really? Dang. 1500.

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. Have you attempted to vibe code any games? I actually have attempted to vibe code like 20 games.

Like, behind the same. scenes. I try it all the time. So I'm like, I have an idea for a game while I'm like cooking. I'm like, this is such a good game. So actually I have one game I want to tell you about I tried to do this dig simulator where we could race. Can you say that again? Would you just say? I try to vibe code a game called

dig simulator. Okay. I think I said dig simulator. Oh, I could do that too. Maybe I did that. So just imagine us core. That's called X.com. Yeah. So imagine us. I thought it was this receipts app. I mean, that's the other one. Yeah. So, hold on.

Time out. I want to tell you about this. This is a great idea. Go trash, go. I'm so interested. 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. So I was trying to make this game out 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 like games, they all kind of look the same. more or less.

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.

Do you actually prompt it like that? Yes. You are a AAA CEO. Yes. You rate the models on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being AAA great. And you will not stop until you get a 10 out of 10 from the harsh AAA game critic. And it will generally actually get like after like five hours. You'll get something that looks better.

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. 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. 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. 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. I want to hear more about your game. I don't even know where I was going with it. I don't even know what is more about the games you're making.

your game ideas are great. They are pretty good. Well, I try to make it another start. They are pretty good. You had to consider that for a little while, and then you were like, you know what? They are.

You know what? They are right about something. Well, because it's like, I try to think of games I would play. And the thing is how good my game ideas are. I don't want to give you guys all the special sauce, because now I get,

I need to do the blender thing. And then maybe, maybe the day game will actually be a real thing. Because I was going to make it for some like hackathon. So I started, like, making all these random games. Started cheating. Building that.

You're building it for a hackathon, but you're just building it all beforehand. That's literally cheating, trash. The definition of cheating. Well, I was going to do it for hackathon, then clearly I didn't. And then I just started building it myself, okay? Because I didn't, I didn't make it in time. Okay. Okay.

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.

And not going to show you. It's not ready yet, but making like my own, like, my like, game boy version. Okay. Okay. Also, I'm sorry for laughing. I'm sorry for laughing. Why are you laughing at me? I'm excited at trash.

The response of every person I've ever met making a vibe code of 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 earned that phrase. Hey, Prime, how's more Doria?

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... What the fuck does that mean?

Okay, let me give you, let me give you an example. That's not how games work. I'm good, but it's not fun. It's not fun. Hold your legendary tongue, wench. Let me tell you about this, okay? 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. Right. Like, that is actually the hard part. I have a game.

It's just not fun yet. Because I don't know. We would 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, the harder. 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 the engine and the game is changed. See? Okay. So, Parm literally did what I did. You could play it when it's not fun yet. Yeah, exactly.

It's not funny, but you're... 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.

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, oh.

It's fantastic. Wow, that sounds really fun. Well, Nick, Nick Dobbs would love this game. There's callbacks that he can hook into. So he'd be like, that's the game. That's the game of the future as you hook into callbacks. Great point. Reply with the source code to it.

But that means you can do anything now. Effectively. Mom, we got callbacks. Yeah, it's all callbacks, baby. It's good. I know where 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, right? A game is the absence of all the things that you can't do, right?

It's carving out exactly the space that's like, this is the set of things that makes this, like, beautiful, organic interaction 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's going to be a number one hit okay you're digging game i'm not sure how that followed but okay your game is friendship slop it's good to be good your his game did sound like friendship 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. Like, how would you do it? You know? That's a French slop game right there. Yep. Yep. This time next year I'm like a booer because of this game.

Trash. If we do, 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. 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? My game is fun. I'm telling you.

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 meming, right now. I will give him a little bit. I'll help him out a little bit here. We're aware. We're aware of the status. But he's making progress. But, but, but at, but at, but at this point, it is like, it is complete in some sense. It's just the, the hardest part, which this is my whole reason why I think people aren't going to vibe code their games is exactly like 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. 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. 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 because even that would become boring because it becomes the same thing 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 games

part of it is like just imagine in your head that you have TikTok but everything that comes up is like trashes thing where it's like dig with the fork real quick and you 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 uh 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, but that's fine because it's the TikTok of games. That's what it will look like, 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 AI is kind of are uniquely bad at finding for you, is the hard part. But that's not necessarily what you would be building for this category in the short term, right? in the near, you know, in the five-year horizon where you're just having these like Slop, AI Slop games. It would be more like a TikTok experience. And again, not taking over all of gaming,

but it would be some, 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. So what you're trying to tell me is that there is a, there is a non-zero market for a Mario Party like friendship slop game. Correct.

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. 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. But there is a new category

that you could see being created in the short term by this, which is just, yeah, Wario Ware, basically, as a much bigger revenue stream. Like, right now,

Wario Ware does not capture much revenue by, by volume, right? If you just looked at, like, Wario Ware is this tiny little sliver in a gigantic game revenue pile. You could see TikTok for gaming, which is just Wario Ware

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? It makes money, I assume. I actually don't know the, 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. And I'm like, take it to the court and we jump on TikTok for gaming. We play three mini games and we determine who's CEO that day. Yep. I do like that. I was thinking there's got to 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 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 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 dollar. I think we might have just made a billion dollar idea. And honestly, these are what the problem.

Trash. I think I saw a black mirror about this. Trash, here's the problem is that we're all going to leave secretly making our own billion dollar company after this. We're going to be about 15 props in being like, you're a horse. It's not a 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 yeah yeah yeah they're all thinking of exactly what this should look like right now not us yeah oh you think selnick CEO of take two that has managed to make hundreds of billions of dollars as smarter than me he only got that guy I'm the smart guy I know yeah we're the smart people on this podcast game developers don't know shit they don't know that's why people come here is for our really smart takes or knowledge.

Oh, I'm okay. Fair. There has also been some tragically bad games that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. So it's not all game developers are in fact good.

That's true. No, 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 going to do it better.

That's why I'm going to win. I worked at Netflix, Casey. I have ideas, okay? Okay, okay, okay. 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, where is our like premium subscription newsletter that costs like $2,000 a month for like analysis or whatever? Like you know what I'm talking about?

Like one of 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? That's another good idea. I like that idea. Keep the ideas going. Keep the ideas going. we need that. We need that. We need like... Even more enhanced or something like that.

Where we like AI generate like a thing that talks about the state of the market. I don't think that is. 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 and graphs like those four sector graphs with just 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 access we could do that we can make that graph Microsoft is leading innovation Casey okay based on the card to 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 C-17er. A TikTok-like experience where watchers get to decide the case. That's just such an... Just you're flipping through the 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 airtime. Love it. It's such a bad idea. I can get airtime. I like it. All right.

and C-17 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. 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. 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. 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 where I made a fun put putt putt game

for our team and some other stuff. I'm working on a fishing game. Not put put putt, save the zoo though, sorry. I'm saying your game sucks. Yeah, your games suck. Yeah, that's because I was in 3D and he's like,

the only put-pup games that are good are stick men 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? 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. Yeah. The D simulator as Trash was talking about earlier. I'll make it.

But like I recognize that I'm a kind of guy that enjoyed like tinkering with Neovim and having fun on Linux but like before LLMs. So it's like it doesn't I don't think it translates really at 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. And it's like, I think that's really the big thing for it.

And I would say, gaming's probably not dead. I'm going to go out there on a limb and I'm going to throw it out there. I'm going to stake that. It's not dead. I, you know, me living in Rapid City, South Dakota, not known as a luscious tech hub. I have yet to meet one person that was like, yo, I love. 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. 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. Soccer. Boatins. When I was around down the trail, a person came up on their game. horse and said to me, I like vibe coding. My agents are working right now.

Do you know what my wife calls it? Do my wife walked to my office? No. Working on carrots. Oh, sorry, my stuff froze there for a second. What is your wife? What does your wife say? My wife walked in like the other week.

Maybe I told the story before, but she was like, are you jive coding? And I'll say, what? Because she heard the term like 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 just like, yeah. Why isn't there something called jive coding? There, someone needs to make something called jive coding right now. It's a thing now. Yeah, just put some sunglasses, get some funky music going on. What does it mean? What does it mean? What does it mean?

What does it mean? Yeah. It's a feeling. It doesn't matter what it mean. It's provocative. Okay. Great boy. 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? I hopefully you learn some amazing things. And this is all for today. Everybody say goodbye. Bye. Bye. Boot up the day.

Vibeco. Errors on my screen. Terminal coffee. living