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If you have ever wondered what the corporate equivalent of tattooing the words “love” and “hate” on the knuckles of each fist would look like, The Pokémon Company has the answer.
如果你曾经想过一家企业在拳头上的每个关节刺上“爱”和“恨”字样的纹身会是什么样子，那么宝可梦公司(The Pokémon Company)就有答案。
In a statement last week, the jointly owned company that gave the world Pikachu and controls our planet’s most valuable media franchise snarled that it had received “many inquiries regarding another company’s game” and would investigate and address any infringement on intellectual property rights. A sentence later, in a whiplash from uncompromising litigant to affable zookeeper, the company chirped that it would continue to “cherish and nurture each and every Pokémon and its world”.
在上周的一份声明中，这家给世界带来了皮卡丘并控制着地球上最有价值的媒体特许经营权的合资公司咆哮着说，它收到了“许多关于另一家公司游戏的询问”，并将调查和处理任何侵犯知识产权的行为。随后的一句话中，这家公司画风突变，从不妥协的诉讼当事人转变为和蔼可亲的动物园管理员，它叽叽喳喳地表示将继续“珍惜和培育每一个精灵宝可梦和它的世界”。
If there was a crazed, on-the-hoof quality to the statement it is because these are indisputably crazed, on-the-hoof times. And there is very much more than an IP dispute at stake here. Generative artificial intelligence has come for the games industry in ways that threaten to change its landscape entirely and quickly.
如果这个声明有一种疯狂、即兴的质感，那是因为这确实是疯狂、即兴的时代。而这里面所涉及的远不止一个知识产权争端。生成式人工智能以一种威胁要彻底改变游戏行业格局的方式进入了这个领域，并且发展迅速。
In particular, AI has raised the serious prospect of a democratisation of game-making — a transformation that could arise from putting ever more formidable creative power in the hands of everybody, a prospect that excites and terrifies in equal measure.
尤其是，人工智能带来了游戏制作民主化的严峻前景——将更强大的创造力交到每个人的手中，可能会带来一场变革，这种前景既令人兴奋，又令人恐惧。
The Pokémon Company’s indirect brush with this arises from Palworld, which was released in mid-January and combines the reliable favourites of monster-taming, survival and (in crucial contrast with Pokémon games) shooting, to stunning early success. Within a week of its launch for the Xbox and PC, Palworld’s small Tokyo-based publisher, Pocket Pair, said it had already sold more than 8mn copies of a game now widely nicknamed “Pokémon with guns”.
与宝可梦公司间接关联的这个游戏，叫做幻兽帕鲁(Palworld)，它于1月中旬发布，结合了可靠的怪物驯养、生存和（与宝可梦游戏形成鲜明对比的）射击元素，取得了惊人的早期成功。在Xbox和PC上发布一周后，幻兽帕鲁的东京小型发行商Pocket Pair表示，他们已经销售了超过800万份这款游戏，现在这款游戏被广泛地称为“带枪的宝可梦”。
Critical and industrial scrutiny of such an extraordinary out-of-the-blue hit was inevitable. That attention has most noisily focused on what many observers see as the resemblance of certain monsters in Palworld to those that inhabit the beloved menagerie of the Pokémon universe.
对于这样一款突如其来的热门游戏，批评界和业界的关注是不可避免的。许多观察家认为，幻兽帕鲁中的某些怪物与宝可梦世界中那些人见人爱的怪物十分相似。
Describing Palworld as a straight rip-off is overstating things, even if the underlying inspiration seems blatant, and there are arguments that the game is, to some extent, satire. Either way, its popularity arises directly from the market gap it fills — real Pokémon don’t have guns, but loads of gamers love shooting things. The Pokémon Company’s statement, meanwhile, leaves little doubt that the debate could be paying the mortgages of the world’s most expensive IP lawyers for some time to come.
将幻兽帕鲁描述为彻头彻尾的抄袭有些言过其实，即使其灵感来源似乎显而易见，也有人认为这款游戏在某种程度上是一种讽刺。无论如何，它的受欢迎程度直接源于填补了市场空白——真正的精灵宝可梦没有枪支，但很多玩家喜欢射击游戏。与此同时，宝可梦公司的声明毫无疑问表明，这场争论可能会让全球最昂贵的知识产权律师的房贷得以支付相当长的一段时间。
However diverting that confrontation may become, the parsing of Palworld’s success by both industry and stock market analysts has shifted to the far more intriguing question of how extensive a role generative AI played in the game’s development. If the answer turns out to be that its makers were heavily reliant on these time and labour-saving AI tools, a second issue then becomes whether that usage has become in effect impossible to spot. Other forms of entertainment — including films, animation and TV scripts — are wrestling with versions of the same question.
然而，无论这场对抗变得多么激烈，业界和股市分析师对幻兽帕鲁的成功进行的解析已经转向了一个更加有趣的问题，即生成式人工智能在游戏开发中扮演了多大的角色。如果答案是制作方在很大程度上依赖这些节省时间和劳动力的人工智能工具，那么第二个问题就是这种使用是否已经变得无法察觉。其他形式的娱乐，包括电影、动画和电视剧本，都在探讨类似的问题。
So far, say veteran industry analysts like Serkan Toto, there is no hard evidence that generative AI was used heavily in Palworld, though he adds that there is every reason to think that it was. In addition to the “gut feel” of veteran game makers, Pocket Pair already produces an AI-powered game called AI: Art Impostor, in which the player takes the role of “a progressive artist who commands AI to generate images, and you don’t need aesthetic talent to draw good artwork”.
像Serkan Toto这样的资深行业分析师表示，到目前为止，还没有确凿的证据表明幻兽帕鲁大量使用了生成式人工智能，尽管他补充说有充分的理由认为确实使用了。除了资深游戏制作人的“直觉感觉”外，Pocket Pair已经制作了一款名为AI: Art Impostor的由人工智能驱动的游戏，在这款游戏中，玩家扮演“一个进步的艺术家，指挥人工智能生成图像，而且你不需要审美才能绘制出好的艺术品”。
The fundamentally unsettling part for the titans of the games industry like Activision Blizzard, EA, Sony, Microsoft and others, though, lies in the scale of Palworld’s possibly AI-fuelled success relative to the size of its producer.
不过，对于动视暴雪(Activision Blizzard)、艺电(EA)、索尼(Sony)、微软(Microsoft)等游戏行业巨头来说，最令人不安的地方在于，幻兽帕鲁（可能是由人工智能推动）的成功，相对于其生产商的规模而言，其规模之大令人不安。
Those giants, argues Nomura Securities analyst Yu Okazaki, have built a market where the scale of spending on development of so called triple-A games confers a huge advantage. As the use of generative AI spreads, says Okazaki, it will be easier for smaller studios and individual creators to produce huge hits, and harder for the big studios to differentiate their output. In an interview last month, the outgoing chief executive of Nexon revealed that its recent triple-A megahit, The Finals, had been created using generative AI and a human team of just 75 people.
野村证券(Nomura Securities)分析师冈崎雄(Yu Okazaki)认为，这些巨头已经建立了一个市场，在这个市场上，开发所谓三A级游戏的支出规模赋予了它们巨大的优势。冈崎说，随着人工智能生成技术的广泛应用，小型工作室和个人创作者将更容易制作大热游戏，而大型工作室则更难实现差异化。在上个月的一次采访中，即将离任的Nexon首席执行官透露，该公司最近推出的三A级巨作《最终决战》(The Finals)就是利用人工智能生成技术和一个仅有75人的人类团队制作出来的。
It is striking, adds Okazaki, that just a few days after Palworld’s release, Microsoft announced 1,900 job cuts at its gaming division — a possible harbinger of the grand reorganisation in store for the whole industry, as the little guy is empowered to make monster hits.
冈崎补充道，令人震惊的是，就在《幻兽帕鲁》发布几天后，微软宣布其游戏部门裁员1900人——这可能预示着整个行业将进行大规模重组，因为小公司有能力制作出巨大的热门游戏。
