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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.
如果你曾經想過一家企業在拳頭上的每個關節刺上「愛」和「恨」字樣的紋身會是什麼樣子，那麼寶可夢公司(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”.
在上週的一份聲明中，這家給世界帶來了皮卡丘並控制著地球上最有價值的媒體特許經營權的合資公司咆哮著說，它收到了「許多關於另一家公司遊戲的詢問」，並將調查和處理任何侵犯智慧財產的行爲。隨後的一句話中，這家公司畫風突變，從不妥協的訴訟當事人轉變爲和藹可親的動物園管理員，它嘰嘰喳喳地表示將繼續「珍惜和培育每一個精靈寶可夢和它的世界」。
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.
如果這個聲明有一種瘋狂、即興的質感，那是因爲這確實是瘋狂、即興的時代。而這裏面所涉及的遠不止一個智慧財產爭端。生成式人工智慧以一種威脅要徹底改變遊戲行業格局的方式進入了這個領域，並且發展迅速。
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，人工智慧帶來了遊戲製作民主化的嚴峻前景——將更強大的創造力交到每個人的手中，可能會帶來一場變革，這種前景既令人興奮，又令人恐懼。
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”.
與寶可夢公司間接關聯的這個遊戲，叫做幻獸帕魯(Palworld)，它於1月中旬發佈，結合了可靠的怪物馴養、生存和（與寶可夢遊戲形成鮮明對比的）射擊元素，取得了驚人的早期成功。在Xbox和PC上發佈一週後，幻獸帕魯的東京小型發行商Pocket Pair表示，他們已經銷售了超過800萬份這款遊戲，現在這款遊戲被廣泛地稱爲「帶槍的寶可夢」。
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.
對於這樣一款突如其來的熱門遊戲，批評界和業界的關注是不可避免的。許多觀察家認爲，幻獸帕魯中的某些怪物與寶可夢世界中那些人見人愛的怪物十分相似。
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.
將幻獸帕魯描述爲徹頭徹尾的抄襲有些言過其實，即使其靈感來源似乎顯而易見，也有人認爲這款遊戲在某種程度上是一種諷刺。無論如何，它的受歡迎程度直接源於填補了市場空白——真正的精靈寶可夢沒有槍枝，但很多玩家喜歡射擊遊戲。與此同時，寶可夢公司的聲明毫無疑問表明，這場爭論可能會讓全球最昂貴的智慧財產律師的房貸得以支付相當長的一段時間。
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，無論這場對抗變得多麼激烈，業界和股市分析師對幻獸帕魯的成功進行的解析已經轉向了一個更加有趣的問題，即生成式人工智慧在遊戲開發中扮演了多大的角色。如果答案是製作方在很大程度上依賴這些節省時間和勞動力的人工智慧工具，那麼第二個問題就是這種使用是否已經變得無法察覺。其他形式的娛樂，包括電影、動畫和電視劇本，都在探討類似的問題。
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這樣的資深行業分析師表示，到目前爲止，還沒有確鑿的證據表明幻獸帕魯大量使用了生成式人工智慧，儘管他補充說有充分的理由認爲確實使用了。除了資深遊戲製作人的「直覺感覺」外，Pocket Pair已經制作了一款名爲AI: Art Impostor的由人工智慧驅動的遊戲，在這款遊戲中，玩家扮演「一個進步的藝術家，指揮人工智慧生成影像，而且你不需要審美才能繪製出好的藝術品」。
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.
不過，對於動視暴雪(Activision Blizzard)、藝電(EA)、索尼(Sony)、微軟(Microsoft)等遊戲行業巨擘來說，最令人不安的地方在於，幻獸帕魯（可能是由人工智慧推動）的成功，相對於其生產商的規模而言，其規模之大令人不安。
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.
野村證券(Nomura Securities)分析師岡崎雄(Yu Okazaki)認爲，這些巨擘已經建立了一個市場，在這個市場上，開發所謂三A級遊戲的支出規模賦予了它們巨大的優勢。岡崎說，隨著人工智慧生成技術的廣泛應用，小型工作室和個人創作者將更容易製作大熱遊戲，而大型工作室則更難實現差異化。在上個月的一次採訪中，即將離任的Nexon首席執行長透露，該公司最近推出的三A級鉅作《最終決戰》(The Finals)就是利用人工智慧生成技術和一個僅有75人的人類團隊製作出來的。
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.
岡崎補充道，令人震驚的是，就在《幻獸帕魯》發佈幾天後，微軟宣佈其遊戲部門裁員1900人——這可能預示著整個行業將進行大規模重組，因爲小公司有能力製作出巨大的熱門遊戲。