Recently,EArevealed its new Imagination to Creation tool that usesAIprompts to make a video game for you in real time. It showed a game scenario in which two friends, starting from a blank screen, entered some simple prompts and ended up in a matter of minutes playing a deathmatch on a tiered level block made of cardboard boxes, with two colourful avatars, where the rule is you can only kill with a grenade. To make the platform bigger, one of the players simply enters the command ‘make it more epic’. You can see the demo in the tweet below.
“Make it more epic.”
⁰EA Chief Strategy officer Mihir Vaidya demonstrates how EA plans to super-charge user-created game content with AI in this concept video “Imagination to Creation” from EA’s Investor Day event in NYC today.pic.twitter.com/sgBnawF7rK
— Geoff Keighley (@geoffkeighley)July 09, 2025
Here’s the thing - these are creative tools at heart. Creativity that is Frankensteined from the minds of others and warped through generic interpretations of stereotypical manifestations with no discernible identity or reason, but creativity nonetheless. If this engine really is as responsive as this tech demo makes it look, thenpeople will make cool things with it.
These cool things will go viral, and a lot of us will feel we have to pretend they suck because AI sucks and the world has one shade of black and one shade of white and I am always in the right. These creations are ethically dubious and take up vast amounts of energy, but ‘AI can’t even draw hands’has always been a losing gamebecause it will always get better at the things it can’t do, but it will also always be ethically dubious and take up vast amounts of energy.
EA’s AI Tool Can Just About Make One Thing
It’s not that everything made from this engine will be bad. It’s that it will mostly be the same. This isn’t, as promised, an infinite playground where you speak words into life. Making a generic level with a cardboard box aesthetic (floating over the ocean, for some reason), with generic guns, destructible walls and floors, and a mechanically simple rule (only grenades kill) is not particularly complicated. There’s a reason why EA used the ‘make it more epic’ line instead of anything specific - this engine will only ever be able to do very precise recreations of existing rules, or very broad interpretations of adjectives.
That’s not a weirdly shaped hand that AI will perfect. It will never be able to do something new because all it knows is what has been fed into it. You could be as weird as possible, and pretend that’s AI doing anything - you could make the platforms into sharks that eat you, you could make the guns do fart noises, you could make it slow motion, you could make it more epic. But you won’t be able to say ‘make me an RPG’ andexpect anything good to come out the end of it.
It could give you the illusion of one. AI DMs inD&Dalready exist and can give youa generic dungeon and keep track of the rules for you, but these mainly pull from the plethora of prompt resources online that need a human input to make sense within a world. I’m sure you could spend hundreds of hours fine-tuning every aspect of the AI generated RPG until it’s just something entirely made by you, but at that point, justlearn to code and actually make one. It would take less time, offer greater control, and be something you could actually sell.
The demo shows us two friends - who speak like the biggest dillweeds on the planet and therefore deserve each other - inventing a shooter level to play each other in a Deathmatch. It’s unlikely to work as well as it did in the demo consistently, but if we give it the grace to say it can, then it’s a neat tool. Ethically dubious, consuming vast amounts of energy, and entirely generic, but neat. I can see the appeal in ‘a shooter but we make some stupid rule and the game listens to us’.
Imagination to Creation can, and will, create some rubbish. And some goofy stuff you may laugh about with friends. And occasionally even something that’s pretty okay to fill half an hour on a night when you’re bored. But that is all this pitch is. It’s not a demo that will change the world. It’s not the future of AI in gaming. It’s not a Polly Pocket game dev you carry round and force them to do your bidding. It’s Stupid Shooter Sim. For a few people, that might be a cool game. But like most AI tools, they only impress the easily impressed, and only perform the specific function they’re currently doing. It’s not the future of gaming or their demise. It’s just a silly little game.
