Maysalward CEO Nour Khrais says AI will not replace game creators
"A game can look beautiful and feel empty..."
Maysalward founder and CEO Nour Khrais believes artificial intelligence will make game development more accessible, but says creative vision will remain essential to making games people want to play.
In a new LinkedIn article, Khrais shared his thoughts on Google's new Playground platform, which allows users to create browser-based games by describing their ideas through text prompts, without needing coding experience.
Khrais compared the technology to the rise of digital photography, saying that making cameras more accessible didn't remove the need for a creative eye.
“Technology can make something playable. Vision makes it worth playing,” Khrais wrote, affirming that a game's success depends on more than its code, graphics or number of levels. Understanding players, culture and what makes an experience enjoyable remains central to good game design.
Creativity still matters
He also acknowledged that AI could reduce some production jobs while helping smaller teams build and test ideas faster. However, he believes collaboration and testing will remain important to making successful games.
"A game is an art form the audience takes part in," Khrais continued. "Players make decisions, fail, compete, laugh, and come back. Coming back is the hard part. A game can look beautiful and feel empty. It can run perfectly and still be boring. It can have 300 levels and give you no reason to play level 4."
He added: "Yes, there will be noise. There will be more games. We'll see more copies and more broken prototypes, and every store and gallery will get noisier. Some production jobs will shrink, and we should be honest about that.
"AI can speed us up and show us options we hadn't considered. It can't settle the argument in the room about whether something is actually fun."
Khrais founded Maysalward in Jordan in 2003 and has spent more than two decades working in mobile game development and cultural localisation.
He also pointed to access as a challenge for developers in the Middle East. At launch, Google Playground is currently available to adults in the US, leaving creators in Jordan and other countries waiting for access.
