I Made Terrible Games With Google’s AI Playground

Neon Don is really pissed at his ex-wife’s lawyer. He’ll tell you any chance he gets while he shotguns lines of pixelated bad guys. He’s also not real—his likeness has only existed for a few minutes in a top-down cyberpunk-style shooter game, generated in the Google Labs service, Playground.

“Keep shooting!” Neon Don says as he mows enemies down. “Brenda took everything else away!”

Playground, which Google launched this week, is part of Google Labs, the company’s landing page for its various AI experiments that haven’t made it into an app or official service quite yet. (Google has done this before with things like music production). It works similarly to Horizon Create, the game generation service Meta announced in September.

Playground is essentially vibe coding for video games, letting people describe in plain language what kind of game they want to make in a chatbot-like interface. Playground then builds a working in-browser version of a game. You can add further instructions to tweak the design from there. If you have assets you want to use as a reference, you can upload photos, videos, or models. Otherwise, the visuals and designs are all AI-generated.

The process of making a game is very straightforward, conversational, and responsive. That means it is perfect for dummies like me with little to no video game development chops or even decent coding skills. By simply throwing out some ideas, I built three playable, stable, and not even remotely good games in one day.

Pork Drop

My first work was Pork Drop, a result generated from the prompt: “Tetris but with cute pigs instead of blocks.” I typed that in, hit build. The AI chugged, then spit out a farm-themed version of Tetris with little pig faces drawn on every block.

Dinner Darling

The next game idea came courtesy of my colleague Jay Dayrit, who, when asked what kind of game I should make, immediately requested, “Gay dinner party.” I typed that in.