Intelligent design

The launch of Stadia at the tail end of last year may have been – and let’s not mince words here – an unmitigated disaster. With only one exclusive title to tempt players who hadn’t already been turned off by reports of the technology’s myriad performance issues, there was scepticism about whether Google’s game-streaming service really did represent the future of play. But perhaps we haven’t been thinking broadly enough about the possibilities. With the muscle of Google’s world-leading infrastructure behind it, Stadia is capable of much more: of not just making playing games more accessible, but developing them.

Google has invested resources in setting up a specialised research and development team within its Stadia arm, composed of ex-game industry employees interested in figuring out how some of Google’s most powerful technology – most notably, machine learning – can be leveraged with regards to games. “The mission of our team is discovering what the data centre as your platform means for games, because it means so many different things,” lead prototype and game designer Erin Hoffman-John tells us. “And we have to start carving away and taking the risks for developers, and then giving them the best of what our risk-taking results in.”

Hoffman-John, a game developer with 17 years’ experience, started Star Lab at the end of 2017: at that time, Google had been working more game developers. It’s got to be easier to develop games, and more people have to be able to develop games. So that’s what our goal with machine learning is: how do we get very small teams who aren’t as expert in games to be able to do really cool things with them?”