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There are plenty of games where the main feature is emergent gameplay resulting from a world simulator and the interplay of basic or complex rules. Dwarf Fortre

There are plenty of games where the main feature is emergent gameplay resulting from a world simulator and the interplay of basic or complex rules. Dwarf Fortress is the OG here but also Sim City and Elite. Single player experiences are a huge segment and these will get better with LLM integration for world building and NPC agents. Fine tuned or custom models that operate on some basic state and rules could also be explored. You could train BERT family models to choose interesting state changes or actions based on the current game state for simple things like a dog NPC that would seem more intelligent by choosing the next action it should take e.g. deciding to chase a squirrel or growl at a new NPC you encountered based on its awareness of the context rather than following some rule system plus RNG. You could get rid of a lot of the stupid seeming game AI behaviour.

fhd2 2y ago
True, though in my mind I put these things into my "lots of interesting novelties" category. Everything in games (including the physics engine!) is typically fine-tuned to provide fun, more than realism. The same is currently true for AI (especially enemy AI), and I believe it'll continue to be that way. Good point on the procedural aspect, Minecraft and similar games came to mind when I wrote my first post. I'd argue they are still fundamentally a designed, shareable experience, and that's my main point really. In Minecraft, you can't talk about the world much with someone else since it's generated, but the mechanics, materials, recipes etc. are the same, and provide exchange between humans playing the same game. I believe we'll even see some successful AI heavy games in the near future, but I also believe we'll cycle back to games being, first and foremost, designed upfront. I might be wrong of course and we might see some kind of holodeck 100% custom game experience become dominant. It's just my hunch that we won't, even if it's feasible. Thinking as far back as I can, people always seem to have wanted two things from games: Fun, and connection to other people.

fhd2 2y ago

True, though in my mind I put these things into my "lots of interesting novelties" category. Everything in games (including the physics engine!) is typically fine-tuned to provide fun, more than realism. The same is currently true for AI (especially enemy AI), and I believe it'll continue to be that way. Good point on the procedural aspect, Minecraft and similar games came to mind when I wrote my first post. I'd argue they are still fundamentally a designed, shareable experience, and that's my main point really. In Minecraft, you can't talk about the world much with someone else since it's generated, but the mechanics, materials, recipes etc. are the same, and provide exchange between humans playing the same game. I believe we'll even see some successful AI heavy games in the near future, but I also believe we'll cycle back to games being, first and foremost, designed upfront. I might be wrong of course and we might see some kind of holodeck 100% custom game experience become dominant. It's just my hunch that we won't, even if it's feasible. Thinking as far back as I can, people always seem to have wanted two things from games: Fun, and connection to other people.