If you don’t pay close attention to game credits you may not know the name Alexander Brandon, but you’ve almost certainly heard his work. The composer of Deus Ex’s soundtrack has some 30 years of games to his name as a musician (Unreal, Stormgate), audio director (Wasteland 3, Neverwinter Nights 2), and even voice actor—who could forget his performances as “Flayed Goat” in Pagan Online or “Additional Mudokon Voices” in Oddworld: Soulstorm?
Okay, those last two aren’t his most prestigious credits—but the point is, Brandon’s list of contributions to game audio run the gamut from legendary to humble, from in-studio director gigs to the sorts of small behind-the-scenes contributions every game needs to get out the door. It’s the kind of resume that seems like it’d guarantee you a job. Unless the state of layoffs and hiring in the games industry was, like, terrible, or something.
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“You have to weigh: ‘Yeah, I could get a full-time job, but how long is it going to last?'” he said.
At this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Brandon co-hosted a roundtable about how AI is impacting audio production for games. He’s a member of a Special Interest Group focused on the technology, which he helped co-found after losing a contract job to AI on a mobile game. He describes their goal as being “like Switzerland,” with a mission statement centered on providing information and looking at AI’s potential benefits for productivity as well as the ethical concerns and legal risks. Documenting where AI companies scrape data from is one of the group’s goals.
The group’s open-mindedness hasn’t attracted developers who are hardline against the use of AI in any form, a perspective he’s sympathetic towards but says he doesn’t “think is the best idea.”
“It’s better to say: ‘AI scares me. I am very, very concerned about it. I have questions. I want to know if I’m going to lose my job. I want to know that humans still really matter. Of course, the tool vendors that we’ve talked to that have joined the working group all say ‘Oh my gosh, humans absolutely matter. We care about humans. And I’m just like ‘All right, now let’s figure out what you mean by that.'”
While AI companies and boosters tend to talk in grand terms about the technology’s limitless potential, Brandon gave me a more grounded perspective on how he sees some AI-driven tools benefitting development. He’s found some success in using AI tools to cut out a lot of time searching for documentation and fiddling with the way audio middleware interacts with a game engine like Unreal. Having the AI integration help place a sound object in the game world saved time and let him focus more on the creative side.
But that’s not exactly the pie-in-the-sky vision AI companies are pushing, which can be particularly grating when you’re among the hundreds of thousands out of work seeing tech CEOs talk about all the jobs it’s about to replace.
“There are CEOs saying nobody’s going to have a job in, like, two seconds, and we’re all going to be in a utopia,” Brandon said. “Money’s just going to flow into our mailboxes and we’re going to turn into Wall-E or whatever. I’m just like, stop the techbro crap—I think people are sick of that.
“People drink all of this Kool-Aid and are like ‘if we don’t use this language, we are behind.’ We need to be behind. We need to acknowledge our limitations, and we need to be able to say, as humans, ‘we can’t keep pushing ourselves through this shitty economy and shitty situation.’ Not to soapbox too much.”
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