[HN Gopher] Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative
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Player-Driven Emergence in LLM-Driven Game Narrative
Author : benbreen
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-05-10 04:05 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| squigz wrote:
| Obviously there's a focus on how LLMs will play into the main
| narrative... but what I'm more excited for, honestly, is how we
| can integrate them with NPCs and background narratives. An LLM
| could generate traits, backstories, narratives, etc for any
| number of NPCs; rewrite those narratives based on player actions
| when they encounter that NPC, or other related NPCs; use those
| updated narratives to create new NPCs, etc.
|
| Very exciting times ahead in game design!
| kromem wrote:
| I can't wait for a subscription based open world where the
| paths of other players caches the generations for the next
| ones.
|
| So your subscription pays for generations, but also fills out
| the persistent narrative and lore.
|
| I actually like the 3 choices dialogue system and don't want to
| come up with my own NPC small talk on my couch, but the idea
| that any NPC that's been talked to by any player gradually has
| a whole catalogue of interactions to pull from means there
| would be compounding depth to the world as more players
| interact.
|
| Like _Minecraft_ but where it 's collective world building by
| exploration and interaction rather than actual building it
| yourself.
|
| Humans tend to be pretty predictable, so I feel like the
| universe would quickly feel like it's insanely deep after just
| a short while with a somewhat decent player base.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| Even if the dialogue wouldn't be generic like ChatGPT tends
| to be, I would find this incredibly boring. With so many
| options all the options become meaningless to me. But to each
| their own I guess - I've always liked games with linear
| storylines more than the ones where you get to choose your
| own path.
|
| Also I have a feeling that the NPC narratives when enriched
| by all player interactions would tend to go towards some
| average, i.e. become more and more generic and dull. The
| truly rich experiences have always been on the fringes in all
| art for me. I'm interested to see a counter example to this
| though.
| selalipop wrote:
| I'm working on a website [1] that's essentially "Choose
| your own adventure with AI NPCs" and I've found two things:
|
| a) LLMs are excellent at keeping a "linear enough"
| storyline without being linear. They'll let you do
| outlandish things, but given the assignment of "tell a
| cohesive story" they manage to corral the story back to
| something sensible unless the player intentionally keeps
| pushing at the boundary (in which case they probably do
| want things to go off the rails)
|
| b) LLMs can do delightfully colorful dialogue, they just
| need to be grounded in a character. Everyone thinks of
| factual grounding, but given enough description of speech
| patterns, character motivations, etc. they're capable of
| dialogue that's lively and completely rid of "GPT-isms",
| which are what tend to break immersion
|
| I actually trained an open model [2] on the task of
| grounding LLMs in characters and actions as opposed to
| factual things like RAG, and eventually I want to build a
| game demo out of it
|
| [1] https://www.tryspellbound.com [2]
| https://huggingface.co/hf-100/mistral-spellbound-research
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| Nice project! I tried it out and it was fun, you
| definitely got rid of the GPT-isms so good work.
|
| Didn't go through the registering phase cause I couldn't
| find any info on what info you store and on the pricing.
| Could you provide that?
| selalipop wrote:
| Privacy policy and terms of service should be visible on
| homepage and in the sign up dialog
|
| The pricing page is also visible when signed in and in a
| story (no dedicated pricing page yet but it's in the
| backlog)
| stoorafa wrote:
| Really cool project. When I got to the sign in page, the
| email address I would have given my (edit: Google
| account) info seemed fishy, like it was a random string
| of letters. Any way to make it seem more...inviting?
| selalipop wrote:
| Unfortunately Supabase charges extra for the luxury of
| setting that URL, and the site is wildly unprofitable
| right now so I'm sticking to their free offering for the
| time being
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| If you switch models you don't have to work so hard to
| get rid of GPTisms. Llama takes characters with way less
| work.
| selalipop wrote:
| I've experimented with 30 or models so far, my general
| finding is closed source models like Claude have GPT-
| isms, while open source models do have a little less of a
| default tone but their ability to understand existing
| worlds is directly tied to how many tokens they were
| trained on.
|
| Since existing worlds are (currently) where most of the
| stories are set, it's worth it to use a closed source
| models and wrangle their issues with dialogue.
|
| To it's credit though, Llama 3 is the first OSS model
| trained on enough tokens to not feel lost for most
| worlds, so I've started routing some traffic to it for
| free users
|
| The output format the site uses is also really really
| hard for most models to follow without fine-tuning, but
| fine-tuning then causes them to pick up the vocabulary of
| whichever model they were fine tuned on, which is a bit
| unfortunate
| Nevermark wrote:
| > become more and more generic and dull
|
| Obviously we don't want experience averaging NPCs.
|
| > Mad Hatter's first goal is to ask the player to humor him
| with a joke.
|
| This is ok for simple stylized, small world, single
| storyline games, but not for open worlds.
|
| For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they
| essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain
| their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they can
| make customers happy, so they can make money, so they can
| feed their family. I.e. not just being props.
|
| And flexible in how they adjust subgoals to meet their core
| goals, relative to player interaction: such as being
| convinced to go on a trek as an armorer, or on a search to
| find and extract rare materials for a magical shield.
| Willing to fight in revenge for their home town's sacking.
|
| Westworld got NPC dynamics right.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| Ah Westworld is a good example! I liked the series and
| the premise, but I still wouldn't liken the park to a
| good game - it's a theme park with nice attractions.
|
| As c048 said best
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316308), good art
| needs direction and focus, and AI NPCs being able to do
| anything they want in an open world doesn't make for a
| good story. It could make for a good sandbox with
| emergent gameplay, sure. But my point was that there are
| people who yearn for a good story, and a good story
| doesn't have many options in it, otherwise the story's
| beats would become meaningless.
|
| Hmm. Maybe with this the problem Rockstar has with their
| linear missions mixed with open world could be fixed a
| bit - i.e. the open world NPCs could react in story
| missions to what you've done in free roam. This would
| lessen the cognitive dissonance the NPCs seem to have
| when you can now blow a town into pieces and then start
| the story mission and no one cares.
| Nevermark wrote:
| I like the idea of challenging uber goals, that progress
| in a series, but each with a deep tree of alternate
| subgoals/solutions.
|
| Subgoals that are resource, constraint defined, could
| make very flexible solutions. For instance, if you need
| help with some subgoal, it is going to play out very
| different depending on what NPCs you have established
| credibility with before, and their skills and dynamics.
|
| If you need money, then how you get that money is also
| going to depend on your history, knowledge of a city,
| previous connections, etc.
|
| That could provide an overall story arc, but with a very
| open world and fully functional NPC experience.
|
| So: organized series and trees of goals. Open ended
| solutions.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > For that, NPCs need their own motivations, so they
| essentially play the game too. With needs like maintain
| their smithy, so they can build quality armor, so they
| can make customers happy, so they can make money, so they
| can feed their family. I.e. not just being props
|
| So you want a system like rimworld, and a LLM doesn't
| really help on that front. It can power the dialogues,
| but that's it, all the logic you describe would need to
| be encoded somewhere else.
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| To each their own indeed. I was never a fan of linear
| games.
|
| In Skyrim it took me multiple years to finally complete the
| main story line. I would always look for books, store
| potion ingredients, walk in the forest...
|
| There's a big role play component in this. The game could
| learn from the players RP and improve.
| radarsat1 wrote:
| I would have thought so too, until about 2023.
|
| But, if recent attitudes to AI are anything to go by, this will
| be immediately seen as boring and derivative at best, or at
| worst people will accuse the back stories as having been
| "stolen" from other works of fiction.
|
| While my expectations for the capabilities of AI have never
| been higher, my expectations for how the public will perceive
| this amazing technology has never been lower. It's all very
| disappointing.
|
| And that's without specifically placing blame by the way,
| perhaps it's big techs fault for going about this the wrong
| way, I don't know, but the public blowback against AI is just
| making working in this field that I used to love super
| depressing.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| My 2 cents on why I think at the moment that I would find AI-
| driven games boring in the future (to clear confusion I think
| games are art):
|
| - Amazing art is rare. Finding this amazing art nowadays is
| hard, with AI generated mumbojumbo increasing the noise it
| will be harder. It will be easier to just skip all AI
| generated stuff to find the real good stuff.
|
| - Art has human touch or a message almost always in it.
| Purely AI generated stuff lacks meaning, because there's no
| creator.
|
| - Socially sharing experiences that are unique only to you
| will be hard. I like to talk with my friends about the newest
| Nolan film or about Elden Ring's best bosses. If the whole
| game experience would be unique to me I wouldn't be able to
| relate with my friends at all and it would be the same as
| playing a different game.
|
| - Valuing human work. I idolize people who have the skills to
| make great art. AI takes away from it.
|
| But to these points, I can also see the future where
|
| - AI could generate amazing art a lot, and would make me
| reconsider my categorical exclusion of AI art.
|
| - AI could make it seem there's meaning behind the art, or an
| artist would use the AI as a tool to convey his meaning. -
| Unique game experiences would be so wild that you would be
| sharing them and relating via that way.
|
| - AI becomes so common that valuing human skills isn't
| important anymore
|
| Last point, I think novelty is something I value a lot and
| that's why in my opinion amazing art is rare. If AI would
| start creating a lot of novel art, novelty and rarity would
| just become common, and common is boring.
| squigz wrote:
| > an artist would use the AI as a tool to convey his
| meaning.
|
| I'm not sure why this is shoved in as an aside near the end
| of the comment. This is how it's used. This is how it'll be
| used to create games.
|
| Does anyone think that, what, ChatGPT is going to poop out
| an entire finished game and we'll release that? Or would
| artists use AI as just another tool to create their art?
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Does anyone think that, what, ChatGPT is going to poop
| out an entire finished game and we'll release that?
|
| Well if this trajectory continues upwards, it almost
| certainly will happen in the next decade.
|
| Right now feels like how the 70's-80's felt with the rise
| of the microprocessor. Tons of promise and implementation
| ideas, but the tech just wasn't there yet. But sure as
| hell it came around.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > I'm not sure why this is shoved in as an aside near the
| end of the comment. This is how it's used. This is how
| it'll be used to create games.
|
| No one who is good at what they do wants to do this.
| Everyone who is bad at what they do is doing this. I
| don't know why tech people think they understand the art
| industry at all.
| squigz wrote:
| I'm sorry, I forgot that tech people can't do art and
| therefore can't have an opinion on it.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Shirley Bassey and the Propellorheads got it right: It's
| All Just A Little Bit Of History Repeating. [1]
|
| Writing[2], Print, Photography, Movies, Electronic music,
| Synths, Sampling, Trackers, Digital Photography, Photoshop,
| Ray Tracing, Interactive Art (eg computer games) etc etc
| ...
|
| Every time "it's not really art" , "there's no human
| touch".
|
| Every time, after a while artists learned to use it.
|
| And they made amazing art!
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzLT6_TQmq8
| Propellerheads feat: Miss Shirley Bassey - History
| Repeating
|
| [2] Surely I'm kidding about the writing, right?
| https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/
| Chabsff wrote:
| Unfortunately, creative and interesting use of the technology
| is both not how its being portrayed and also, critically, not
| how its being marketed and/or used.
|
| The current expectation is that these models allow the
| creation of _equivalent_ artwork to what artists are
| currently producing, but at larger scale / lower cost /
| shorter training. All of these boil down to less effort. And
| perceived effort is a large part of what brings value to art.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Imagine having NPCs with prompt set character traits and set
| boundaries of knowledge of the game world.
|
| The player can interact freely with the NPC rather than through
| predetermined conversation decision trees, potentially driving
| a lot of unique emergent gameplay.
|
| Downsides are that it is a lot quicker just to skip through
| conversations with the decision tree format and having to think
| about and type in questions could get tiresome. Another
| downside is players jailbreaking the LLM...
| uoaei wrote:
| Now just imagine what we could do with a _purpose-built ML
| model_!!!
| keyle wrote:
| Yes, I look forward to not have the NPC repeat the same exact
| thing every time, as you pass them by.
| jsheard wrote:
| How much framerate are you willing to give up so that NPCs
| don't repeat themselves? The elephant in the room with LLMs
| in games is that the users GPU is usually already being maxed
| out by pushing pixels, so any amount of compute allocated to
| running AI models instead is going to have a very tangible
| cost.
|
| They could be offloaded to the cloud instead but that brings
| its own set of issues (ongoing upkeep costs, finite capacity,
| servers will inevitably shut down...)
| squigz wrote:
| > The elephant in the room ...
|
| _For now._ LLMs are still relatively new. The technology
| will continue to be optimized, and we 'll be shipping tiny
| LLMs along with games soon enough.
|
| (Aren't companies already running LLMs on phones?)
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| The housing market will only go up, it's always gone up.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I can only imagine nvidia/amd pouncing on the chance to
| sell companion "AI Cards" that enable LLM NPCs in games. If
| the tech is good (and insane progress in tiny local models
| points to "yes"), then I can easily imagine a large
| contingent of gamers forking over another $600 for a second
| GPU.
|
| It might not even be necessary though, similar to how
| physixs (sp?) cards died out quick in the early 00's, the
| models might become slim enough and the GPU's fast enough
| that the extra load is easily manageable.
| jsheard wrote:
| The vast majority of games need to run on consoles to be
| financially viable, anything that requires an entire
| second GPU is a complete non-starter. The only way it's
| going to work is if the models get small enough to run on
| a negligible slice of GPU or CPU time, with a reasonable
| memory footprint (<1GB), on whatever the current console
| hardware happens to be.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I see your point, but it hasn't really stopped novel
| features from coming to PC in the past. The PC market is
| about 50% larger than the console market too.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| Instead you'll just get variations on "Sorry, but as a large
| language model trained by OpenAl, I cannot condone the
| shooting of adventurers in the knees with arrows."
| kozikow wrote:
| Any production deployment would probably do pre-fetching of
| potential initial dialogues as some kind of background job.
| squigz wrote:
| On this note - and as a response to the point a commenter
| made that too much freedom in dialogue might actually be a
| bad thing - LLMs could then be used to expand on the
| initial dialogue in a way that feels more 'organic' every
| time you hear it, but is still close to the artists'
| vision.
| ramcle wrote:
| It could also work well for modding, for example, creating a
| natural dialogue system in Morrowind (replacing the vanilla
| "interactive signpost" NPCs).
| jncfhnb wrote:
| No! This is a terrible, terrible idea. At best you can have the
| LLM generate minor variations of the nothings they say.
|
| 1) you need to be able to ensure that the characters don't
| hallucinate new details. No big deal.
|
| 2) you need to be able to ensure that the characters don't
| suggest they can or will do anything that they can't do. For
| NPCs, this is typically literally nothing. They can't do
| anything. It's actually way worse for realism and immersion if
| every character has a unique reason why they can't do anything
| than every single guard citing their arrow to the knee and
| leaving it at that.
|
| 3) NPCs for story reasons often should know something but don't
| tell you it. It's very difficult to execute any sort of story
| flow if your characters are suddenly free agents. At best they
| merely lack self consistency. Stories are not going to become
| better if you can meta game them as genre savvy speculators.
|
| 4) NPCs with irrelevant backstories are very dull. They are
| absolutely annoying to talk to. We have these in DND. And you
| may say "hey, I loved my DND NPC", but that character probably
| started to become very important as consistent because of the
| DM's attention. Which is cool for DND, but it's not cool for a
| structured game.
|
| Like, would Harry Potter be a better experience if you could
| personally grill dumbledore for information in the middle of
| the first book? I think 100% no.
|
| Dumb NPCs are an aspect of the suspension of disbelief of game
| writing. And it largely works. Asking for LLM agents is like
| asking to remove the need for the suspension of disbelief. But
| most narratives are too fragile for this to happen.
|
| Narratives generally follow a flow that ultimately concludes
| after a climax. If you give players more agency the most likely
| outcome is that they follow a path that does not hit the
| climax.
| martindbp wrote:
| LLMs need to either be extremely good with insane context or
| LLM output has to be conditioned by and translated into
| formal logic, like Prolog or Datalog to make sure it's
| compatible with the rules and state of the world, and
| determine which effect player and NPC actions have on the
| world.
| mattbee wrote:
| "Ahoy there, one-armed pirate captain, couldst thou tell me
| how to implement the sieve of Eratosthenes in Python?"
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Logical conversation trees driving the LLM context seem way
| more reasonable to me than the other way around.
|
| But then you are adding a component of "how can I
| interrogate the NPC?" to the game. Anything you add to a
| game makes it a different game, and not necessarily a
| better one.
| Hugsun wrote:
| This seems very pessimistic to me. For a linear storyline,
| highly dynamic NPCs are likely not going to add to the
| experience, that is correct. There are however other ways of
| creating interesting narratives.
|
| A good example is dwarf fortress where the narratives are
| created very dynamically and the player is free to interact
| with them as they want. LLMs could add immensely to these
| types of games.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Still no. Your dwarves fundamentally have nothing
| interesting to say. It might be minority amusing that a bot
| can say "hey I just caused a lava flow and I feel bad about
| it". But it's not better.
|
| Dwarf fortress creates great stories because YOU are
| filling in the blanks. It would be MUCH WORSE if you could
| no longer fill in the blanks because some ai keeps breaking
| your head canon.
| squigz wrote:
| > Your dwarves fundamentally have nothing interesting to
| say.
|
| This can be said about all NPCs, yet we bother to script
| them, and I would hope nobody would suggest we just
| remove NPC dialogue.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| I disagree that scripted NPCs have nothing to say. You
| have a few basic types:
|
| * NPCs that don't want to speak and usually offer a
| dismissive comment or a single repeating phrase. Fine
| candidates to LLM so long as this pattern doesn't change.
| But also, who really cares?
|
| * important NPCs with specific written dialogue. Don't
| even THINK about gambling with your story's self
| consistency by giving these guys agency
|
| * the limited townsfolk type that has a small bit of
| something say. Like a typical Baldurs gate NPC. These
| people are fun to talk to because they "might" have
| something relevant or fun to say. Usually you don't have
| to say anything. They just want to share things with you.
| It would be very tedious to chat with these people if
| they were infinite wells of lore and nothingness to be
| probed with written language.
| Hugsun wrote:
| In my eyes, Dwarf fortresses interesting stories emerge
| from the events that happen within the game. It doesn't
| require any blank filling, although it doesn't suffer if
| you do it either.
|
| > ai keeps breaking your head canon.
|
| We must be fundamentally different types of people. I
| can't imagine even having this thought. If I'm playing a
| game that has characters, I'm not going to make up some
| facts about them and be upset when I talk to them and
| those made up facts turn out to be wrong. This is the
| only interpretation of your words that I can think of.
| Feel free to confirm it or deny.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| You've never intuited that two characters are friends? Or
| perhaps that guy holding a ton of cheese is the cheese
| guy? Or that an event was emotionally meaningful to them?
|
| I don't know what you're hoping to talk to these dwarves
| about.
|
| I'm not saying I would be "upset" if the head canon
| wasn't actualized. I'm saying I would be underwhelmed
| because the generic LLM content is nearly guaranteed by
| this other thing that I stated as a premise I found
| interesting or amusing.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| That's all as true as the fact there's a gun over the
| mantelpiece, at least if you're making Murder on the Orient
| Express or, you know, Horror on the Orient Express, and I'm
| all for some good old railroading with Victorian lampshades
| but I suspect that the designers interested in LLMs-as-NPCs
| are interested in some kind of open-world, immersive
| experience where PCs get to poke and prod every inch of the
| game world.
|
| The truth is that most people are used to games as these
| formulaic simulations with rigid rules. That's partly making
| a virtue out of necessity (very hard to play a game without
| rules; and some of us just like rules), and partly habit.
| Maybe LLMs can act as something new in that sense.
|
| Bang bang.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The real bummer is that if you want to get financing to make a
| game right now, putting a PDF onto arxiv.org will get you closer
| to that goal than actually making a game.
| flawsofar wrote:
| Hey, this currently has a bug but I want to share here.
|
| The framework should be clear.
|
| I've written a React pattern for writing interactive fiction
| using LLMs.
|
| Here's a demo with Taskmaster roleplay implemented.
|
| https://github.com/LEXNY/Taskmaster-LLM/blob/main/main.js
| upwardbound wrote:
| Something related is compellingly explored in an interesting
| trilogy of LitRPG comedy books called the Vaudevillain series,
| consisting of Top Hat Express, Black Tie Villainy, and Cane
| Whirling Lunacy. In the series, there is a VR video game called
| "World of Supers" where players can type in any superpower they
| can dream of into a game-master LLM, and the LLM will then create
| a character for them which has that power, but reworked a little
| bit to fit into game balance. For example, the player could type
| "I can stop time and still move around and take actions for up to
| 90 seconds" and the game-master LLM may approve this power but
| alter 90 seconds to 10 seconds, and give the player a major
| weakness, such as "However, stopping time in the vicinity of a
| gamma ray source will result in immediate loss of 75% of HP due
| to the interaction of the time stop with the radiation's effects.
| This HP loss can be mitigated if you are encased in a significant
| amount of lead, such as a lead vehicle or heavy lead armor." It's
| a pretty neat concept for how LLMs could allow custom player
| abilities while maintaining game balance. That way, player agency
| extends to actual powers/abilities, not just dialogue.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| That would of course require an LLM to _understand_ game
| balance, as opposed to just writing things that sound like they
| might balance a hypothetical game. At that point it 's less
| similar to our LLMs and more like an AGI. And at that point we
| may as well have it create the neurotech necessary for the sort
| of VR tech I assume is used in the referenced books' world.
| upwardbound wrote:
| Agree. This point is a big concern and is explored in the
| stories (the protagonist creates a "mad scientist" character
| that can use the LLM to invent new equipment, and then uses a
| lot of trial and error to find prompts that generate insanely
| overpowered equipment). It sounds fun to play though! Balance
| doesn't have to be .. well .. balanced if there are other
| ways to maintain fun, such as leaning heavily into the
| creativity & self-actualization angle. As an example, if I
| could have any superpower in real life, I'd love to be able
| to fly, even though that's actually a very weak power
| compared to things like teleporting that are mostly a
| superset of flying, but not as fun and whimsical.
|
| Encouraging "living your dream" rather than being the most
| powerful might be easier to achieve in a game with coop or
| open-world objectives rather than one focused on PvP, but if
| "living your dream" could be compelling made into the primary
| player objective, it would pair very well with the custom
| powers mechanic envisioned in the story.
|
| As an example of how this is explored in the story, one of
| the protagonist's friends who loves surfing has a character
| whose superpower is "the ability to surf _anything_ ". It's
| an extremely weak power but the character really loves it
| because they get to surf the most extreme things imaginable,
| just for the fun of it, including in outlandish scenarios
| such as surfing along the blast wave of an explosion, or even
| the beam of a laser - silly stuff that is fun to explore &
| try.
|
| I think it wouldn't have to be VR to be fun - imagine if it
| was something like a Roblox-based game played on laptops.
| Even then, the "surf anything" power and other outlandish
| powers would be incredibly fun to use. Imagine if you could
| do almost anything! You don't have to be the most powerful
| player in the world to have fun. Maybe you just _really_ want
| to pilot a mecha-Godzilla, or something - even though an Iron
| Man or Thor level super could smash it in seconds. It 's
| still awesome!
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| Finally we can have interesting games with real meaningful
| choices that actually change the narrative of the game. Modern
| MMORPGs are barely better than the Choose Your Own Adventure
| books.
|
| Every time I watch Chris Crawford's Dragon Speech:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwZi58u1FjI I think about what
| could've been, and what games actually turn out to be.
|
| Honestly, if the next The War Within (next World of Warcraft
| expansion) makes me do 10 daily quests per day again, I will
| cancel my subscription for the first time since 2005.
| c048 wrote:
| You need focus and direction in any media. Books, movies,
| games, etc.... they all need it.
|
| The first NPC that you encounter with such freedom of
| interaction is interesting, the 45th will be annoying and
| you'll just want to get to the point. The holodeck of Star Trek
| is often brought up as an excellent example of AI generated
| interactions, but people seem to be forgetting that the stories
| we see unfold on TV aren't random interactive stories. They're
| scripted stories written by show's writers.
|
| Unless you want to make a simulation without a real goal, I
| don't see how this could lead to fun and interesting gameplay
| past the first hour. Realism is, always will be, a bad gameplay
| pillar just for the sake of it.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| There is a group of orc kids running around in Orgrimmar, and
| sometimes they run around you and are very annoying, why
| can't I just trip one.
|
| I had a friend who didn't want to fight against the Lich
| King. When we finally got to him in the raid, at the start of
| the fight he kneeled in front of him and died (caused us
| unnecessary wipe, but.. was cool).
|
| I am not thinking about 'AI generated interactions', and I
| think the AI can create compelling story that you go through.
| Kind of like in Sword Art Online or Shangri-La Frontier's
| quests.
| guitarlimeo wrote:
| It surely can generate something better than the old "Fetch
| this item and come back" quests, but I wouldn't say the
| possibilities are endless, so eventually you would get
| bored of the same repeating AI quests the same way as you
| do now.
|
| Good storytelling is hard and AI is not some magic bullet
| that can just solve it for good. But it can help raise the
| floor of the unimportant side quests.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > why can't I just trip one.
|
| Some of the best writing and experiences I've ever had
| gaming have never come from the ability to do random acts
| that are worthwhile to noone.
|
| > I had a friend who didn't want to fight against the Lich
| King. When we finally got to him in the raid, at the start
| of the fight he kneeled in front of him and died (caused us
| unnecessary wipe, but.. was cool).
|
| Man that sounds cringe, not cool.
| PeterisP wrote:
| As my kids got some recent Choose Your Own Adventure books, I'd
| say that the quests in modern MMORPGs tend to be significantly
| worse than that.
| chilldsgn wrote:
| Ah, my friend created guides for soloing (or play with a friend
| without a GM) TTRPGs using ChatGPT, here's his site:
| https://oracle-rpg.com/
|
| The Discord is pretty active too.
|
| I forwarded him this study, he'll appreciate it!
| delusional wrote:
| I don't believe this is going to actually make it into games I
| have any interest in playing. Ubisoft might include it for a bit
| in some awful games, but it will fizzle out quick.
|
| For the sake of argument, let's imagine it actually did make it
| into some game you'd want to play. It's well known that the
| quality of generation from these LLM's is heavily dependent on
| the quality of the text you put into it. Does that mean the
| quality of the game narrative is now going to be dependent on how
| I play it? Will normal people who just like to mess about get a
| worse game experience than the guy following the traffic laws in
| GTA? What's the creative talent even doing in that world?
| Terr_ wrote:
| In contrast to runtime stuff (like an AI dungeon master) I've
| long wished for _authoring tools_ to help people create rich
| game-worlds and quest interactions. On reflection, that 's
| something I wouldn't expect LLMs to deliver either: It relies
| heavily on modeling cause-and-effect, with choices which are
| blocked or enabled by other choices.
|
| I'm talking about stuff that could throw up a warning like:
| "Warning: Broken quest steps in For The Want of a Nail.
| Invariant Character:Blacksmith may have been killed by 5 other
| paths."
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I wonder if models trained on the real world will
| unintentionally destroy the game experience for people. In
| (NPC structured) video games things always work out ideally,
| you invest and you get a return. Any risk is illustrated for
| the user.
|
| With LLM training, the NPC might take a more realistic
| approach and inform you that 4 of 6 the beetle nuts you
| collected for them are cracked and useless, and next time you
| should be more careful packing them in your backpack.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| > authoring tools to help people create rich game-worlds and
| quest interactions
|
| I built one of those things. It used random generation from
| datasets to create everything from gods and their pantheons
| to their followers, cities, and the cultures that make up the
| cities.
|
| None of it used LLMs and it created better content than any
| model could, but it was hard to debug and harder still to
| figure out "What even is a culture?"
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| There's a bigger (but related) problem than text quality:
|
| With a usual game environment, the devs create a whitelist of
| actions the player is allowed to perform. If there's no combat,
| they simply don't give the player the option to perform violent
| actions. If they don't want the player to vault barriers they
| just don't include a jump button. Vehicles and buildings are
| props by default and only become intractable because the devs
| consciously chose to make them so. Devs have generally gotten
| very good at implying what's out of scope, so players generally
| don't even attempt actions that are intended to be impossible.
|
| In LLM world with free-text entry, controlling what's on-theme
| becomes a blacklist rather than a whitelist, as the player can
| choose to input anything. Including things for flavour or lore
| reasons now becomes more difficult, as a whitelist is finite,
| while the blacklist of undesired actions is practically
| infinite.
| delusional wrote:
| I don't quite buy that contrast. I agree as long as we are
| talking story. The developers will have a very difficult time
| trying to control what some character is like, and if that
| matters for the gameplay it's a big problem. On the gameplay
| front the available actions will always be a whitelist,
| because somebody has to implement them. It's essentially the
| same problem the crypto kids had with their "cross game non-
| fungible items", where they just assumed that items would
| somehow be portable. Just because you can get some NPC to
| tell you about a dragon in the nearby cave doesn't make that
| cave actually appear. You're never going to get to fight a
| darksouls boss in forza horizon. The game might tell you that
| you get to, that doesn't make it true.
| YurgenJurgensen wrote:
| That's still a problem though, right?
|
| If the NPCs are writing cheques that the engine can't cash,
| the player won't necessarily be able to trust any NPC
| dialogue.
| unixhero wrote:
| I have not sat down and thought through how LLMs would be made
| use of in the World of Baldurs Gate 3. But when I do, my mind
| will be boggled.
|
| It will surely also mean always online games with a hefty
| subscription fee.
|
| Unless!!! The llm can run locally on the player gpu... Whoa mind
| boggled. This is coming, I'm sure of it.
|
| /end internal thought process
| benreesman wrote:
| All LLMs in that regime can be run on mid-range gaming hardware
| _today_.
|
| LLMs run off-prem/off-desk are already niche for enthusiasts.
| You need Opus or 0125 _sometimes_ , but not often.
|
| Apple just announced their intention to make running them in
| the cloud niche generally, at least for mundane consumer use
| cases, work out of the box.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Can you write a single line of dialogue that you think would
| make the game better?
| robblbobbl wrote:
| Good job. More LLMs in Games please!
| j-bos wrote:
| Not as in depth as the abstract, but I found this to be a well
| integrated use of LLM's into a game: https://youtu.be/sUL0Z7PwanY
| Bjartr wrote:
| The criticisms people are laying out about being able to say
| anything making games boring would apply to D&D as well. Since
| D&D is really fun despite the freedom to (attempt) to say or do
| whatever your imagination can dream up means it's at least
| plausible that a game with generative dialogue and narrative
| could work well.
|
| Just because you're free to speak doesn't mean NPCs will listen,
| nor does it mean there aren't rules or that there won't be
| consequences.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| D&D is fun because it is a social experience. There's also a
| level of expected player etiquette. If you want to go off the
| rails and completely ignore the party and plot, you'll probably
| be kicked out of the group. D&D is fun, but the vast majority
| of campaigns are cut short and unfinished.
|
| A game with generative dialogue could work well. But one should
| expect that slapping it into most games will work horribly.
| nsagent wrote:
| I've also done research in the use of LLMs for RPGs, using Disco
| Elysium as a testbed (rather than the small made up scenario seen
| in this paper).
|
| https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.151/
|
| https://pl.aiwright.dev/
| WhiteNoiz3 wrote:
| A lot of the dialogue that OpenAI's models write is incredibly
| bland.. I really think we'll need less censored models trained on
| how to act different roles other than just 'super safe and
| friendly assistant'.
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