6 ms·

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 b

• uoaei 3y ago
  Now just imagine what we could do with a purpose-built ML model!!!
• kromem 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 https://www.tryspellbound.com [2] https://huggingface.co/hf-100/mistral-spellbound-research https://huggingface.co/hf-100/mistral-spellbound-research
      • guitarlimeo 3y ago
        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 3y ago
          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 3y ago
        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?
• radarsat1 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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?
• antihipocrat 3y ago
  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...
• keyle 3y ago
  Yes, I look forward to not have the NPC repeat the same exact thing every time, as you pass them by.
  • jsheard 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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 3y ago
        The housing market will only go up, it's always gone up.
    • Workaccount2 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.
• ramcle 3y ago
  It could also work well for modding, for example, creating a natural dialogue system in Morrowind (replacing the vanilla "interactive signpost" NPCs).
• jncfhnb 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      "Ahoy there, one-armed pirate captain, couldst thou tell me how to implement the sieve of Eratosthenes in Python?"