I've spent the last year or so trying to capture what makes generative AI feel magically fun. I had some ways to describe it, but I heard it best from a fellow founder at GDC: playful creation.

This explains the main observation I had: that I would obsess over my ChatGPT-assisted fan fiction, and you may obsess over your Midjourney art, but to you my fanfiction is bland and to me your art is generic.

We obsess over our creations because we made them. We bake ourselves in them and when we contemplate them we see creatures made in our own image. And thus, we take pride in our work and love them.

I think this is true for all personal creations of any craft.

But generative AI completely changes how we create. By reducing the cost of crafting to just a prompt, we convert hobbies into games: creation now has a natural risk, reward, repeat loop. On every prompt we take a bet and the models reward us for our daringness, and then we repeat. Every single one of our incantations, no matter how silly, is celebrated by the model.

This is exactly what we do with Midjourney or ChatGPT (what I would consider a first level of playful creation). And it cleanly explains vibe coding. In fact, vibe coding as an instance of playful creation is best exemplified by websim. But it's not alone, Rosebud, Replit Agent, Storycraft, and Nilo are all varying instances of a second level of playful creation.

I think there is an overemphasis on creating UGC platforms. While I don't doubt at some point there will be a gigantic market of vibe-creations, I think its premature to optimize for that.The focus should be on tightening that core game loop of playful creation. Yes that may involve sharing, but most likely just to a close circle of friends.

If you see playful creation as a core game mechanic, then there are whole games to be built around that mechanic. That means inner and outer loops, meta progression, lore, etc. We are very much in the early innings.