It's super cool but I see it as a much more flexible open ended take on the idea of procedurally generated worlds where hard-coded deterministic math and rendering parameters are replaced by prompt-able models.
The deadness you're talking about is there in procedural worlds too, and it stems from the fact that there's not actually much "there." Think of it as a kind of illusion or a magic trick with math. It replicates some of the macro structure of the world but the true information content is low.
Search YouTube for procedural landscape examples. Some of them are actually a lot more visually impressive than this, but without the interactivity. It's a popular topic in the demo scene too where people have made tiny demos (e.g. under 1k in size) that generate impressive scenes.
I expect to see generative AI techniques like this show up in games, though it might take a bit due to their high computational cost compared to traditional procedural generation.
> In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
And modern America asked itself, why can't it be both?
Here's a book that accompanied an exhibition in 1993 that discusses the relationship between art and games (German, sorry) https://boerverlag.de/SPIELE.html
From the article: "Because the essence of a video game, which makes it more than a low-quality animated movie, is that it is interactive and requires the player to enact the plot. It transforms the player’s mind."
Arguably, as others in this thread have said, all other art forms are transformative in the same way. As far as definitions go this is pretty much essential to any art (opposed to, say, the intentions of the artist as we kind of agree that an artist can create art even if they don't intend to).
If the bar for something being art is that it transforms the mind, it's an incredibly low bar for games. Any game, which is not ridiculously easy, forces the player the learn the controls and the rules of the game (otherwise the player can't progress). The more original the controls and the gameplay is (to the player), the more learning has to happen. For someone disagreeing with this, try watching someone play a first-person shooter for the first time in their life, and then compare it to someone who has been playing Counter-Strike for years. If the resulting difference in skill is not a result of the game transforming the brains of the player, then what is it?
reply