It was a matter of time before AI invaded gaming, and Microsoft wanted to be at the forefront of the revolution. This week, Microsoft revealed Muse, a cutting-edge generative AI model capable of understanding 3D game worlds and player inputs to generate AI-rendered gameplay. Muse is the first of what Microsoft is calling a World and Human Action Model (WHAM).
Microsoft Research partnered with developer Ninja Theory (Hellblade 2) to build Muse. With its understanding of game physics and how a game reacts to player interaction, Microsoft says the model can “create consistent and diverse gameplay rendered by AI, demonstrating a major step toward generative AI models that can empower game creators.”
Katja Hofmann, leader of the Microsoft Research Game Intelligence team, explains that she and her colleagues have been collecting gameplay data from Ninja Theory’s 2020 competitive online game Bleeding Edge for years, which was used to mold Muse.
“From the hackathon that started it all,” said Gavin Costello, technical director at Ninja Theory, “where we first integrated AI into Bleeding Edge, to building AI agents that could behave more like human players, to the World and Human Action Model being able to dream up entirely new sequences of Bleeding Edge gameplay under human guidance, it’s been eye-opening to see the potential this type of technology has.”
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Microsoft sees a wide range of ways that Muse AI and other WHAMs could shape the future of gaming. Among the most intriguing is Muse’s potential ability “to take older back catalog games from our studios and optimize them for any device.” It requires a great deal of time and effort to get certain games up and running on modern hardware, but a World and Human Action Model doing the heavy lifting could make the process much more manageable.
“For Xbox, game creators will always be the center of our overall AI efforts,” says Fatima Kardar, CVP of Gaming AI at Microsoft. “We believe there is space for traditional game development and future generative AI technologies that serve as an extension of creative work and offer novel experiences. As part of this, we have empowered creative leaders here at Xbox to decide on the use of generative AI. There isn’t going to be a single solution for every game or project, and the approach will be based on the creative vision and goals of each team.”
You can see videos of Muse in action on the Microsoft Research Blog. You can also learn even more about how World and Human Action Models are able to generate gameplay in the lengthy research paper published in Nature on Wednesday.
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