Frank Kelly Freas, The Gulf Between
Here’s a puzzle — back in 2021, when the new AI era was just kicking off, it seemed obvious (to me at least) that it would lead to new kinds of games and radically new forms of gameplay. But here we are, 5 years later, and we haven’t seen anything to speak of. Clearly, AI is having a huge impact on how games are developed (like it has for all software), but there haven’t been any significant new AI-based game experiences. What gives?
What’s Out There
Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe there are some cool AI-centric games that I’m overlooking? Let’s see…
AI Dungeon. This is the big one, obviously, and the earliest. The first version was built on GPT-2 in December of 2019. It peaked in popularity in ‘21, and has gradually declined since then. In my view AI Dungeon was always just a lightweight wrapper around the raw text-prediction engine. Most of its appeal was based on the underlying novelty of text-generation per se. I don’t get the sense that “prompt an LLM to tell you an interactive story” is a promising new kind of game people are especially excited about.
To be honest, that’s the only one I had even heard about. But apparently there have been a couple of other semi-successful ones…
Death by AI . A party game where an AI game master presents a scenario, players describe their character’s actions and the AI decides who survives. I guess this was a viral hit? Apparently it got funding from a16z and some other VCs. Maybe this is fun. It wasn’t fun when I thought of the same idea a few years ago and playtested a prototype of it, but maybe I was missing something.
Suck Up! Players are vampires trying to convince AI-based characters to let them in. Another version of conversation as gameplay. Look, I’m not going to tell you that I also thought of this game years ago and tried it out and it wasn’t good, because I didn’t. But you know what large language models are like, imagine doing a “funny” improv game with one.
There have also been a handful of semi-viral demos of AI-powered game “engines”. There was one that was a sort of Drunk Minecraft and Google has one called Genie 3 which seems technically impressive but also seems kind of boring. Even if it is capable of generating a reasonable facsimile of a stable, coherent 3D space you can move through and interact with, there’s nothing particularly mind-blowing or novel or interesting about these spaces. They just look like clunkier, sloppier versions of run-of-the-mill video games.
Am I asking for too much here? I don’t think so. Video games’ main job is to blow people’s minds. They are extremely good at highlighting the things that are amazing about computers. I distinctly remember the shudder of sublime metaphysical weirdness that went through me the first time I played DOOM on a LAN and turned the corner and saw another person who was inside that imaginary space with me. I remember having my mind blown by MYST. I remember my first encounter with the linguistic magic of Infocom’s parser-based adventure games. I sometimes feel some of that magic when interacting with LLMs, but nothing remotely like that from any of these AI games.
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