Half-Life and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has detailed how him and his team have been using Generative AI for research and development at Valve.
During the latest episode of The MinnMax Show, Valve writer Erik Wolpaw, known for his work on Portal, Portal 2, and Half-Life: Alyx, offered a look at how his small team within Valve has been experimenting with generative AI. He was quick to clarify that these efforts are not part of a formal, company-wide initiative, but rather a “small group of people kind of poking around at this stuff.” Their goal is to explore the potential of a rapidly evolving technology that would be “kind of silly not to look into at least.”
Despite the industry-wide anxiety surrounding generative AI, Wolpaw said that he is “currently not worried about [the technology] taking over creative writing because it is pretty bad at it.” He added that his team has “really been messing around with it.” In his view, while AI can produce competent text, it struggles with originality and humor. However, he identified one area where it shows genuine promise i.e. reactive character dialogue.
Traditionally, games rely on pre-written dialogue trees and conditional triggers, which he describes as “matrices” of responses, such as in Left 4 Dead. Generative AI, by contrast, introduces the possibility of real-time conversational reactions to player behavior. “We’ve always had to simulate characters in the game reacting to whatever you do,” Wolpaw explained, but now, “the verbs are actual verbs of you just saying things and seeing what happens.”
That said, the Half-Life and Portal writer pointed out that AI often fails to stay contextually grounded, mentioning the example of action role-playing game Where Winds Meet, where a generative AI-driven NPC in a feudal Japan setting demonstrated awareness of the US city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He suggested that the technology works best when used collaboratively rather than autonomously. “I’ve written a scenario [and] it’s a real collaboration between the writer and the AI,” he stated.
Wolpaw further clarified that his interest in AI is not about cutting costs. “I’m interested in this in so far as it makes a better experience, not as a cost cutting measure,” he said.
