8 ms·

It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies th

It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds filled with lousy, limited, poorly written stories. Star Wars movies have looked phenomenal for a decade, full of bland stories we’ve all heard a thousand times. Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t care if it looks like Minecraft, I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Procedural infinite world gen recharged gaming, where is the procedural infinite story generation? Still, awesome demo. I imagine by the time my kids are in their prime video game age (another 5 years or so) we will be in a new golden age of interactive story telling. Hey siri, tell me the epic of Gilgamesh over 40 hours of gameplay set 50,000 years in the future where genetic engineering has become trivial and Enkidu is a child’s creation.

levkk 2y ago
No Man's Sky is kind of what you're looking for, except you may notice its quests (and worlds) become redundant quickly...I say quickly, but that became the case for me after like 30 hours of game play.
- jsheard 2y ago
  That's the kicker, LLM driven stories are likely to fall into the same trap that "infinite" procedurally generated games usually do - technically having infinite content to explore doesn't necessarily mean that content is infinitely engaging. You will get bored when you start to notice the same patterns coming up over and over again. Procgen games mainly work when the procedural parts are just a foundation for hand-crafted content to sit on, whether that's crafted by the players (as in Minecraft) or the developers (as in No Mans Sky after they updated it a hundred times, or Rougelikes in general).
  - est31 2y ago
    Yeah, generative AI can create cool looking pictures and video but so far it hasn't managed to create infinitely engaging stories. The models aren't there yet.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      I'd argue that the same principle applies to pictures, there are many genres of AI image that are cool the first time you see them, but after you've seen the exactly the same idea rehashed dozens of times with no substantial variety it starts wearing really thin. AI imagery is often recognizable as AI not just because of charactistic flaws like garbled text but because it's so hyper-clichéd.
      - lenocinor 2y ago
        I wonder if there's some threshold to be crossed where it can be surprising for longer. I made a video game name generator long ago that just picks a word (or short phrase) from each of three columns. (The majority of the words / phrases are from me, though many other people have contributed.) I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe the Spelunky-type approach can be surprising for longer; that is, make a bunch of hand-curated bits and pick from them randomly: https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/ https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
wongarsu 2y ago
Dwarf Fortress is the state of the art in procedural interactive story generation. Youtube channels like kruggsmash show how great it is in that role if you actually read all the text. But that doesn't translate well to websites, trailers or demos. It's easier to wow people with graphics.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  I think that would be Rimworld, which is laser-focused on this aspect to the point of allowing you to pick different kinds of "narrators" ? (Dwarf Fortress being much more focused on generating a whole world.)
  - digging 2y ago
    But the narrators aren't narrators; they're just different settings for the relative frequencies of events. Dwarf Fortress is still a more robust "story generator", as the vast majority of what occurs in Rimworld is still basically random events, disconnected from prior events or context.
    - BlueTemplar 2y ago
      I guess I see what you mean, but the way they handle difficulty scaling, and the existence of quest chains, by being more fake, is closer to how stories are told, than the more 'realistic' simulation of Dwarf Fortress.
foolfoolz 2y ago
we have reliable infinite story generation in PvP multiplayer. if the matchup is fair, every game can be different and exciting. see chess
- miltonlost 2y ago
  is PvP multiplayer considered a "story"? Is a football game a "story"? I guess if all you consider for story is "things happen", then a PvP match can be a story, but that's stretching what I would consider "story" for a game. That is the story of the match, but it's not in and of itself a plot story.
  - programd 2y ago
    > is PvP multiplayer considered a "story"? Consider EVE Online. The stories it generates are Shakespearean and I defy anyone to argue that they have no plot. I would go further and predict that stories generated by sufficiently advanced AI can explore much more interesting story landscapes because they need not be bound by the limitations of human experience. Consider what stories can be generated by an AI which groks mathematics humans don't yet fully understand?
    - fwip 2y ago
      Why would a story about nonsensical mathematics be interesting to a human?
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    I agree, the parent would've been much better suited with the example of PVE/PVP Roleplaying. People make up stories all the time
miltonlost 2y ago
> I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Procedural infinite world gen recharged gaming, where is the procedural infinite story generation? You're not gonna get new intriguing stories from AI which only regurgitates what it's stolen. You're going to get a themeless morass without intention. I also find it amusing how your example to Siri uses one of the oldest pieces of literature when you also tire of stories heard a thousand times before.
- 93po 2y ago
  if you do basic chatgpt prompts in late 2024 asking for dynamic story telling, sure, you'll get what you said. it's super dismissive to think that wont get better over time, or that even with the tools today, that you can't get dynamic and interesting stories out of it if you provide it with the proper framework
  - krainboltgreene 2y ago
    > it's super dismissive to think that wont get better over time When did we start thinking this way? That things HAVE to get better and in fact to think otherwise is very negative? Is HN under a massive hot hand fallacy delusion?
    - miltonlost 2y ago
      Lots of people want that AI grift money and need to be pollyanna true believers to convince others that models that don't know truth are useful decision makers
    - rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
      How could creativity in AI not get better? Sure, progress will likely not be linear or without challenges, but we already have the human brain as proof that it is possible.
      - fwip 2y ago
        Mountains exist, but that doesn't mean we'll ever build a structure the size of Everest.
digging 2y ago
I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not impossible, but by default we should expect it to make games less fun. The better you make this infinite narrative generator, the more complicated the world gets and the less compelling it gets to actually interact with any one story. Stories thrive by setting their own context. They should feel important to the viewer. An open world with infinite stories can't make every story feel meaningful to the player. So how does it make any story feel meaningful? I suppose the story would have to be global, in which case, it crowds out the potential for fractal infinite storylines - eventually, all or at least most are going to have to tie back to the Big Bad Guy in order to feel meaningful. Local stories would just feel mostly pointless. In Minecraft, all (overworld) locales are equally unimportant. Much like on Earth, why should you care about the random place you appeared in the world? The difference is that on Earth you tend to develop community as you grow and builds connections to the place you live, which can build loyalty. In addition, you only have one shot, and you have real needs that you must fulfill or you die forever. So you develop some otherwise arbitrary loyalties in order to feel security in your needs. In Minecraft there's zero pressure to develop loyalty to a place except for your own real-life time. And when that becomes a driving factor, why wouldn't you pick a game designed to respect your time with a self-contained story? (Not that infinite games like Minecraft are bad, but they aren't story-driven for a good reason). Now, a game like Dwarf Fortress is different because you build the community, the infrastructure, the things that make you care about a place. But it already has infinite story generation without AI and I'm not sure AI would improve on that model.
- vagab0nd 2y ago
  It's a search problem. By definition, an infinite game is as boring as real life. To make it interesting, the engine must be able to search for a good story based on player actions. You can see this today already. Many games will guide the player into one or a few predefined stories. A better game would not have them predefined, but generated on-the-fly based on player actions.
- raincole 2y ago
  > I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not impossible, but by default we should expect it to make games less fun. I'd say AAA games have been on track of "less fun" for at least half a decade. So this sounds like a natural next step.
lifeisstillgood 2y ago
Ok - you got me. That’s actually a use case I can understand- and what’s more I think that humans could generate training data (story “prototypes”?) that somehow (?) expand the phase space of story-types Ironic though - we can build AI that could be creative but it’s humans that have to use science and logic because AI cannot?
ec109685 2y ago
Given we have engines that can render complex 3d worlds, can maintain consistency far longer than a minute and simulate physics accurately, why put all that burden on a GenAI world generator like this? It seems like it’d be more useful to have the model generate the raw artifacts, world map, etc. and let the engine do the actual rendering.
empath75 2y ago
It only looks like a video game because video game footage is plentiful and cheap. Now, imagine training it on thousands of hours of PoV drone footage from Ukraine, and then using that to train autonomous agents.
- TexanFeller 2y ago
  I’d prefer we trained AI politicians by watching Team America World Police and statements made by George Bush and the neocons after 9/11. Maybe AI politicians could learn from their mistakes and stop involving us in foreign proxy wars in the first place. Especially ones that could escalate to nuclear armageddon.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dmarcos 2y ago
If stories (and AAA games in general) are bland in games is due in large part to how expensive are to produce. Risk tolerance is low. If game assets are cheap to generate you’ll see small teams or even solo developers willing to take more creative risks
- griomnib 2y ago
  Counter point: you’d see a corresponding exponential increase in QA labor, and just like with the web, Steam will be absolutely flooded with slop. So I see the most likely outcome is a lot of dogshit and Steam being forced to make draconian moves to protect the integrity of the store.
  - alphabetting 2y ago
    Seems like there's already a lot of slop on steam and I really doubt it will be difficult for quality content to be highlighted even if the amount of games increases 1000x or more
    - dmarcos 2y ago
      Yeah. Video and Youtube is an example. Filtering is not a hard problem. Mega tons of bad stuff doesn’t bother me.
      - miltonlost 2y ago
        Love that Youtube filter that spits out what I should consume. Thank you corporate algorithm for telling me what is a good thing to watch
        dmarcos 2y ago
        You can subscribe to the channels you like and ignore the rest.
  - jsheard 2y ago
wildermuthn 2y ago
I love that almost all the responses to your question are, "No! Bad idea!" It's a great idea. We want more than an open-world. We want an open-story. Open-story games are going to be the next genre that will dominate the gaming industry, once someone figures it out.
- throwup238 2y ago
  IMO this will be the differentiating feature for the next generation of video game consoles (or the one after that, if we’re due for an imminent PS6/Xbox2 refresh). They can afford to design their own custom TPU-style chip in partnership with AMD/Nvidia and put enough memory on it to run the smaller models. Games will ship with their own fine tuned models for their game world, possibly multiple to handle conversation and world building, inflating download sizes even more. I think fully conversational games (voice to voice) with dynamic story lines are only a decade or two away, pending a minor breakthrough in model distillation techniques or consumer inference hardware. Unlike self driving cars or AGI the technology seems to be there, it’s just so new no one has tried it. It’ll be really interesting to see how game designers and writers will wrangle this technology without compromising fun. They’ll probably have to have a full agentic pipeline with artificial play testers running 24/7 just to figure out the new “bugspace”. Can’t wait to see what Nintendo does, but that’s probably going to take a decade.
- spencerflem 2y ago
  From 2018 - https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-ending-further.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/... "There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out. Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist. This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades."
hbn 2y ago
Creativity is the one area where LLMs are completely unimpressive. They only spit out derivative works of what they’ve been trained on. I’ve never seen an LLM tell a good joke, or an interesting story. It doesn’t know how to subvert expectations, come up with clever twists, etc. they just pump out a refined average of what’s typical.
- rationalfaith 2y ago
  [dead]
- basch 2y ago
  they also struggle to know when to break the rules of english, make up words, introduce pun, bounce between tones, write with subtext, introduce absurdity, allude to other ideas etc. I'd say its less the work they have been trained on, and more what they have been reenforced to do, which is stay on topic. it causes them to dwell instead of drift.
- shadowmanif 2y ago
  Claude can make some interesting guitar tabs if you prompt it to transcribe an instrument/music that wouldn't normally be something a rock guitar player would be influenced by. It is like saying the paint brush and canvas lack creativity. Creativity is not a property of the tool, it is a property of the artist. We also have a very poor understanding of human creativity from selection bias. Last weekend I found a book at the library that was Picasso's drawings 1966 to 1968. There must have been 1000-1500 drawings in this book. Many were just half finished scribbles. The average person seems to believe though that the master artist only produces masterpieces because they didn't bother to look at all the crap.
- brookst 2y ago
  > They only spit out derivative works of what they’ve been trained on How is that different from humans? Do we get magic inspiration totally separate from anything we’ve learned? Show me any great book, song, movie, building, sculpture, painting. I will tell you the influences the artist trained on.
ddtaylor 2y ago
> It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds Those beautiful worlds took a lot of money to make and the studios are smart enough to realize consumers are apathetic/stupid enough to accept much lower quality assets. The top end of the AAA market will use this sparingly for the junk you don't spend much time on - stuff the intern was doing before. The bottom of the market will use this for virtually everything in their movie-to-game pipeline of throwaway games. These are the games designed just to sucker parents and kids out of $60 every month. The games that don't even follow the story of the movie and likely makes the story worse. Strangely enough this is where the industry makes the vast majority of it's day-to-day walking around cash.
com2kid 2y ago
IMHO Humans will still create the overarching stories, what LLMs will do is help fill in the expensive blanks that make adding stories to a world hard. For example, right now if you save an entire village from an attacking tribe of orcs, only a handful of NPCs even say anything, just a nice little "thanks for saving our town!" and then 2 villages over the NPCs are completely unaware of a mighty hero literally solo tanking an entire invading army. Why is that? Well you'd need lots of, somewhat boring but important, dialogue written, and you'd need tons of voice lines recorded. Both those are now solvable problems with generative AI. AI generated dialogue is now reasonably high quality, not "main character story arc" high quality, but "idle shop keeper chit chat" quality for sure, it won't break immersion at least. And the quality of writing from AI is fine for 2 or 3 sentences here and there. I'll be soon releasing a project showing this off at https://www.tinytown.ai/ https://www.tinytown.ai/ the NPC dialogue is generated on a small LLM that can be ran locally, and the secret of even high quality voice models is that they don't require a lot of memory to run. I predict that in another 4 or 5 years we'll see a lot of models ran at the edge on video game consoles and home PCs, fleshing out game worlds.
hackernewds 2y ago
if stories you're needing, there's an LLM I have to sell you
8note 2y ago
Dwarf fortress is kindof an infinite story generator
paxys 2y ago
There are a lot of great storytellers who don't have the technical/design skills to bring their ideas to life. AI generation is going to make that part easier, which is a good thing.
ganzuul 2y ago
> Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? To me this basically describes God, once you get all the mods and DLC.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
I wouldn't hold my breath : if you want great stories (that you didn't imagine yourself), see who is hiring great writers.
Miraltar 2y ago
wildermyth does procedural story/quest creation really well but it isn't infinite
hulium 2y ago
Unexplored comes to my mind, it differs from other games with procedural generation in that it generates a graph for the gameplay first and builds the levels around it. It's not necessarily ground breaking, but it has a special feel to it as objects are placed with purpose.
tomaskafka 2y ago
“The inhabitants kept addressing the player and begging him to not shut down their world, so this patch raises punishments for breaking the 4th wall to eternal torment for all the perpetrator’s descendants and that seems to fix the problem for now.”
brookst 2y ago
The talent isn’t fungible. The people who make amazing synth patches are rarely the same people who write amazing songs. The people designing great fonts are not the same people who write great books. We should celebrate creation of tools and capabilities, while also acknowledging that there are many layers yet to be completed before your very cool ad hoc video game request can be delivered.
staticman2 2y ago
I'm skeptical- of course the technology could improve, when I look at LLM story output it isn't very well written in terms of creativity. This makes sense when it is basing it's output on variations of "most likely token but with some RNG built in." You end up with stuff that's much less surprising and original than what a good human author would invent. Star Wars isn't great- but if a single company didn't own Star Wars we'd likely see some companies competing with really great Star Wars stuff- and others sucking at it. The issue is economic.
e12e 2y ago
> Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t care if it looks like Minecraft, I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Dwarf fortress?

levkk 2y ago

No Man's Sky is kind of what you're looking for, except you may notice its quests (and worlds) become redundant quickly...I say quickly, but that became the case for me after like 30 hours of game play.

jsheard 2y ago
That's the kicker, LLM driven stories are likely to fall into the same trap that "infinite" procedurally generated games usually do - technically having infinite content to explore doesn't necessarily mean that content is infinitely engaging. You will get bored when you start to notice the same patterns coming up over and over again. Procgen games mainly work when the procedural parts are just a foundation for hand-crafted content to sit on, whether that's crafted by the players (as in Minecraft) or the developers (as in No Mans Sky after they updated it a hundred times, or Rougelikes in general).
- est31 2y ago
  Yeah, generative AI can create cool looking pictures and video but so far it hasn't managed to create infinitely engaging stories. The models aren't there yet.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    I'd argue that the same principle applies to pictures, there are many genres of AI image that are cool the first time you see them, but after you've seen the exactly the same idea rehashed dozens of times with no substantial variety it starts wearing really thin. AI imagery is often recognizable as AI not just because of charactistic flaws like garbled text but because it's so hyper-clichéd.
    - lenocinor 2y ago
      I wonder if there's some threshold to be crossed where it can be surprising for longer. I made a video game name generator long ago that just picks a word (or short phrase) from each of three columns. (The majority of the words / phrases are from me, though many other people have contributed.) I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe the Spelunky-type approach can be surprising for longer; that is, make a bunch of hand-curated bits and pick from them randomly: https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/ https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/

wongarsu 2y ago

Dwarf Fortress is the state of the art in procedural interactive story generation. Youtube channels like kruggsmash show how great it is in that role if you actually read all the text. But that doesn't translate well to websites, trailers or demos. It's easier to wow people with graphics.

BlueTemplar 2y ago
I think that would be Rimworld, which is laser-focused on this aspect to the point of allowing you to pick different kinds of "narrators" ? (Dwarf Fortress being much more focused on generating a whole world.)
- digging 2y ago
  But the narrators aren't narrators; they're just different settings for the relative frequencies of events. Dwarf Fortress is still a more robust "story generator", as the vast majority of what occurs in Rimworld is still basically random events, disconnected from prior events or context.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    I guess I see what you mean, but the way they handle difficulty scaling, and the existence of quest chains, by being more fake, is closer to how stories are told, than the more 'realistic' simulation of Dwarf Fortress.

foolfoolz 2y ago

we have reliable infinite story generation in PvP multiplayer. if the matchup is fair, every game can be different and exciting. see chess

miltonlost 2y ago
is PvP multiplayer considered a "story"? Is a football game a "story"? I guess if all you consider for story is "things happen", then a PvP match can be a story, but that's stretching what I would consider "story" for a game. That is the story of the match, but it's not in and of itself a plot story.
- programd 2y ago
  > is PvP multiplayer considered a "story"? Consider EVE Online. The stories it generates are Shakespearean and I defy anyone to argue that they have no plot. I would go further and predict that stories generated by sufficiently advanced AI can explore much more interesting story landscapes because they need not be bound by the limitations of human experience. Consider what stories can be generated by an AI which groks mathematics humans don't yet fully understand?
  - fwip 2y ago
    Why would a story about nonsensical mathematics be interesting to a human?
- wholinator2 2y ago
  I agree, the parent would've been much better suited with the example of PVE/PVP Roleplaying. People make up stories all the time

miltonlost 2y ago

> I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Procedural infinite world gen recharged gaming, where is the procedural infinite story generation? You're not gonna get new intriguing stories from AI which only regurgitates what it's stolen. You're going to get a themeless morass without intention. I also find it amusing how your example to Siri uses one of the oldest pieces of literature when you also tire of stories heard a thousand times before.

93po 2y ago
if you do basic chatgpt prompts in late 2024 asking for dynamic story telling, sure, you'll get what you said. it's super dismissive to think that wont get better over time, or that even with the tools today, that you can't get dynamic and interesting stories out of it if you provide it with the proper framework
- krainboltgreene 2y ago
  > it's super dismissive to think that wont get better over time When did we start thinking this way? That things HAVE to get better and in fact to think otherwise is very negative? Is HN under a massive hot hand fallacy delusion?
  - miltonlost 2y ago
    Lots of people want that AI grift money and need to be pollyanna true believers to convince others that models that don't know truth are useful decision makers
  - rjrdi38dbbdb 2y ago
    How could creativity in AI not get better? Sure, progress will likely not be linear or without challenges, but we already have the human brain as proof that it is possible.
    - fwip 2y ago
      Mountains exist, but that doesn't mean we'll ever build a structure the size of Everest.

digging 2y ago

I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not impossible, but by default we should expect it to make games less fun. The better you make this infinite narrative generator, the more complicated the world gets and the less compelling it gets to actually interact with any one story. Stories thrive by setting their own context. They should feel important to the viewer. An open world with infinite stories can't make every story feel meaningful to the player. So how does it make any story feel meaningful? I suppose the story would have to be global, in which case, it crowds out the potential for fractal infinite storylines - eventually, all or at least most are going to have to tie back to the Big Bad Guy in order to feel meaningful. Local stories would just feel mostly pointless. In Minecraft, all (overworld) locales are equally unimportant. Much like on Earth, why should you care about the random place you appeared in the world? The difference is that on Earth you tend to develop community as you grow and builds connections to the place you live, which can build loyalty. In addition, you only have one shot, and you have real needs that you must fulfill or you die forever. So you develop some otherwise arbitrary loyalties in order to feel security in your needs. In Minecraft there's zero pressure to develop loyalty to a place except for your own real-life time. And when that becomes a driving factor, why wouldn't you pick a game designed to respect your time with a self-contained story? (Not that infinite games like Minecraft are bad, but they aren't story-driven for a good reason). Now, a game like Dwarf Fortress is different because you build the community, the infrastructure, the things that make you care about a place. But it already has infinite story generation without AI and I'm not sure AI would improve on that model.

vagab0nd 2y ago
It's a search problem. By definition, an infinite game is as boring as real life. To make it interesting, the engine must be able to search for a good story based on player actions. You can see this today already. Many games will guide the player into one or a few predefined stories. A better game would not have them predefined, but generated on-the-fly based on player actions.
raincole 2y ago
> I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not impossible, but by default we should expect it to make games less fun. I'd say AAA games have been on track of "less fun" for at least half a decade. So this sounds like a natural next step.

lifeisstillgood 2y ago

Ok - you got me. That’s actually a use case I can understand- and what’s more I think that humans could generate training data (story “prototypes”?) that somehow (?) expand the phase space of story-types Ironic though - we can build AI that could be creative but it’s humans that have to use science and logic because AI cannot?

ec109685 2y ago

Given we have engines that can render complex 3d worlds, can maintain consistency far longer than a minute and simulate physics accurately, why put all that burden on a GenAI world generator like this? It seems like it’d be more useful to have the model generate the raw artifacts, world map, etc. and let the engine do the actual rendering.

empath75 2y ago

It only looks like a video game because video game footage is plentiful and cheap. Now, imagine training it on thousands of hours of PoV drone footage from Ukraine, and then using that to train autonomous agents.

TexanFeller 2y ago
I’d prefer we trained AI politicians by watching Team America World Police and statements made by George Bush and the neocons after 9/11. Maybe AI politicians could learn from their mistakes and stop involving us in foreign proxy wars in the first place. Especially ones that could escalate to nuclear armageddon.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

dmarcos 2y ago

If stories (and AAA games in general) are bland in games is due in large part to how expensive are to produce. Risk tolerance is low. If game assets are cheap to generate you’ll see small teams or even solo developers willing to take more creative risks

griomnib 2y ago
Counter point: you’d see a corresponding exponential increase in QA labor, and just like with the web, Steam will be absolutely flooded with slop. So I see the most likely outcome is a lot of dogshit and Steam being forced to make draconian moves to protect the integrity of the store.
- alphabetting 2y ago
  Seems like there's already a lot of slop on steam and I really doubt it will be difficult for quality content to be highlighted even if the amount of games increases 1000x or more
  - dmarcos 2y ago
    Yeah. Video and Youtube is an example. Filtering is not a hard problem. Mega tons of bad stuff doesn’t bother me.
    - miltonlost 2y ago
      Love that Youtube filter that spits out what I should consume. Thank you corporate algorithm for telling me what is a good thing to watch
      - dmarcos 2y ago
        You can subscribe to the channels you like and ignore the rest.
- jsheard 2y ago

wildermuthn 2y ago

I love that almost all the responses to your question are, "No! Bad idea!" It's a great idea. We want more than an open-world. We want an open-story. Open-story games are going to be the next genre that will dominate the gaming industry, once someone figures it out.

throwup238 2y ago
IMO this will be the differentiating feature for the next generation of video game consoles (or the one after that, if we’re due for an imminent PS6/Xbox2 refresh). They can afford to design their own custom TPU-style chip in partnership with AMD/Nvidia and put enough memory on it to run the smaller models. Games will ship with their own fine tuned models for their game world, possibly multiple to handle conversation and world building, inflating download sizes even more. I think fully conversational games (voice to voice) with dynamic story lines are only a decade or two away, pending a minor breakthrough in model distillation techniques or consumer inference hardware. Unlike self driving cars or AGI the technology seems to be there, it’s just so new no one has tried it. It’ll be really interesting to see how game designers and writers will wrangle this technology without compromising fun. They’ll probably have to have a full agentic pipeline with artificial play testers running 24/7 just to figure out the new “bugspace”. Can’t wait to see what Nintendo does, but that’s probably going to take a decade.
spencerflem 2y ago
From 2018 - https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/why-i-am-ending-further.html https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/interactive-storytelling/... "There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out. Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist. This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades."

hbn 2y ago

Creativity is the one area where LLMs are completely unimpressive. They only spit out derivative works of what they’ve been trained on. I’ve never seen an LLM tell a good joke, or an interesting story. It doesn’t know how to subvert expectations, come up with clever twists, etc. they just pump out a refined average of what’s typical.

rationalfaith 2y ago
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basch 2y ago
they also struggle to know when to break the rules of english, make up words, introduce pun, bounce between tones, write with subtext, introduce absurdity, allude to other ideas etc. I'd say its less the work they have been trained on, and more what they have been reenforced to do, which is stay on topic. it causes them to dwell instead of drift.
shadowmanif 2y ago
Claude can make some interesting guitar tabs if you prompt it to transcribe an instrument/music that wouldn't normally be something a rock guitar player would be influenced by. It is like saying the paint brush and canvas lack creativity. Creativity is not a property of the tool, it is a property of the artist. We also have a very poor understanding of human creativity from selection bias. Last weekend I found a book at the library that was Picasso's drawings 1966 to 1968. There must have been 1000-1500 drawings in this book. Many were just half finished scribbles. The average person seems to believe though that the master artist only produces masterpieces because they didn't bother to look at all the crap.
brookst 2y ago
> They only spit out derivative works of what they’ve been trained on How is that different from humans? Do we get magic inspiration totally separate from anything we’ve learned? Show me any great book, song, movie, building, sculpture, painting. I will tell you the influences the artist trained on.

ddtaylor 2y ago

> It’s interesting to me that we continue to see such pressure on video and world generation, despite the fact that for years now we’ve gotten games and movies that have beautiful worlds Those beautiful worlds took a lot of money to make and the studios are smart enough to realize consumers are apathetic/stupid enough to accept much lower quality assets. The top end of the AAA market will use this sparingly for the junk you don't spend much time on - stuff the intern was doing before. The bottom of the market will use this for virtually everything in their movie-to-game pipeline of throwaway games. These are the games designed just to sucker parents and kids out of $60 every month. The games that don't even follow the story of the movie and likely makes the story worse. Strangely enough this is where the industry makes the vast majority of it's day-to-day walking around cash.

com2kid 2y ago

IMHO Humans will still create the overarching stories, what LLMs will do is help fill in the expensive blanks that make adding stories to a world hard. For example, right now if you save an entire village from an attacking tribe of orcs, only a handful of NPCs even say anything, just a nice little "thanks for saving our town!" and then 2 villages over the NPCs are completely unaware of a mighty hero literally solo tanking an entire invading army. Why is that? Well you'd need lots of, somewhat boring but important, dialogue written, and you'd need tons of voice lines recorded. Both those are now solvable problems with generative AI. AI generated dialogue is now reasonably high quality, not "main character story arc" high quality, but "idle shop keeper chit chat" quality for sure, it won't break immersion at least. And the quality of writing from AI is fine for 2 or 3 sentences here and there. I'll be soon releasing a project showing this off at https://www.tinytown.ai/ https://www.tinytown.ai/ the NPC dialogue is generated on a small LLM that can be ran locally, and the secret of even high quality voice models is that they don't require a lot of memory to run. I predict that in another 4 or 5 years we'll see a lot of models ran at the edge on video game consoles and home PCs, fleshing out game worlds.

hackernewds 2y ago

if stories you're needing, there's an LLM I have to sell you

8note 2y ago

Dwarf fortress is kindof an infinite story generator

paxys 2y ago

There are a lot of great storytellers who don't have the technical/design skills to bring their ideas to life. AI generation is going to make that part easier, which is a good thing.

ganzuul 2y ago

> Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? To me this basically describes God, once you get all the mods and DLC.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

I wouldn't hold my breath : if you want great stories (that you didn't imagine yourself), see who is hiring great writers.

Miraltar 2y ago

wildermyth does procedural story/quest creation really well but it isn't infinite

hulium 2y ago

Unexplored comes to my mind, it differs from other games with procedural generation in that it generates a graph for the gameplay first and builds the levels around it. It's not necessarily ground breaking, but it has a special feel to it as objects are placed with purpose.

tomaskafka 2y ago

“The inhabitants kept addressing the player and begging him to not shut down their world, so this patch raises punishments for breaking the 4th wall to eternal torment for all the perpetrator’s descendants and that seems to fix the problem for now.”

brookst 2y ago

The talent isn’t fungible. The people who make amazing synth patches are rarely the same people who write amazing songs. The people designing great fonts are not the same people who write great books. We should celebrate creation of tools and capabilities, while also acknowledging that there are many layers yet to be completed before your very cool ad hoc video game request can be delivered.

staticman2 2y ago

I'm skeptical- of course the technology could improve, when I look at LLM story output it isn't very well written in terms of creativity. This makes sense when it is basing it's output on variations of "most likely token but with some RNG built in." You end up with stuff that's much less surprising and original than what a good human author would invent. Star Wars isn't great- but if a single company didn't own Star Wars we'd likely see some companies competing with really great Star Wars stuff- and others sucking at it. The issue is economic.

e12e 2y ago

> Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t care if it looks like Minecraft, I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Dwarf fortress?