Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next. That's why most areas are designed as linear corridors so that there is a straightforward progression, and most NPCs interactions are meant to offer something meaningful so as to not waste the player's time.
But imagine if interaction with NPCs wasn't just a content delivery mechanism, but instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.
The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content. All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Maybe a new player skill would be to be able to identify the genuine threads of exciting content, be it designed or emergent, within the noise of an AI-generated world.
Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? A starting point might be to approach it as something more akin to LARP or improvisation theater, you'd give each NPC and player a role they need to fulfill. Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
That’s a slot machine, and the same mechanism which also gets us hooked on social media. Sounds like something which would immediately be exploited by vapid addiction-as-a-feature games à la FarmVille.
> The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content.
Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun. Constraints are a feature.
> All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.
Good reminder to go take a walk outside. Take a train to somewhere we haven’t been. Pick a road we’ve never crossed. We don’t even need a mini map, and sucks that we don’t have teleportation back to base, but we do have a special device which always points the way back.
> Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? (…) Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.
Agreed. Though not enjoying it and abandoning it is fine, I’m more worried about people not enjoying it but feeling unable to quit (which already happens today, but I think the proposed system would make it worse).
> Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun.
this seems to assume that the only way to feel rewarded / have fun is by comprehensively extracting content from the game. in order to have fun in an "emergent" generative game of this nature, you'd need to let go of that goal.
i do agree with the risks surrounding engineered engagement.
Not my intention, that is not something I believe. I’m not a completionist (I get those who are, but to me it can get boring or stressful) and I see the appeal in sandbox games (even if I don’t usually play them).
Wrong right from the outset. Some games are designed around content and "extraction". Many are not.
While I think the parent post leaves a lot of open ended questions, I think they are spot on about the tightness of design in games.
In many open world RPGs, or something like GTA, you cannot open every door in a city. In street fighter you can't take a break to talk to your opponent. In art games like Journey you cannot deviate from the path.
Games are a limited form of entertainment due to technical and resource restrictions, and they always will be. Even something as open ended and basic as minecraft has to have limits to the design, you wouldn't want the player to be able to collect every blade of grass off of a block just because you could add that. You have to find the balance between engaging elements and world building.
Having a LLM backed farmer in an RPG that could go into detail on how their crops didn't grow as well last season because it didn't rain as much seems good on paper for world building. But it is just going to devalue the human curated content around it as the player has to find what does and does not advance their goals in the limited time they have to play. And if you have some reward for talking to random NPCs players will just spam the next button until it's over to optimize their fun. All games have to hold back from adding more so that the important parts stand out.
But even for story-driven games, you can signal when you're "done" extracting story-related details in various ways, by e.g. prompt the NPC to include dialogue element A,B,C when it fits the conversation, keep track of which were output (you can make it output a marker to ensure it's easy to track even if the dialogue element has been worded differently), and have it get annoyed and tell you it doesn't have more to tell you or similar as the repetition adds up.
But that's not how real life works at all, right? You talk to someone for as long as you want to talk to them, or until they start sending signals that they are done talking with you.
The way video game dialog works has always bothered me, it makes characters feel stilted and makes me care less about the characters and the world.
(Although it's a different game in many ways, consider by contrast how Portal 2 handles dialog, and the effect that has on immersion.)
How real life works is always a plausible interesting goal, but it's very often at odds with a bunch of other valuable goals for players.
A particular sharp example of this is sports video games. It might well be interesting (and certainly realistic) to simulate bad referees in a sports game. Horrible blown calls by tennis line judges, or missed calls by basketball refs, or bad umpire calls on pitches. Real-life soccer makes working the refs and their inability to see everything an art form, as far as I can tell.
Perhaps that's interesting, but the irony here is that real life refs are actually bad simulations of the original perfect game code in the first place, from a certain point of view. I think debates about the use of instant replay in sports gets at the heart of this, and one could imagine using real-time AI to help refs taking this conversation much further.
I think the sports case is a particularly sharp example, but it definitely holds with all sorts of choices in games.
For Animal Crossing in particular, I remember when I finally played it, it struck me after a while how much it had in common with recent MMOs (Everquest and World of Warcraft) that I had had fellow game developer friends have their lives severely disrupted by. And when I played the original Animal Crossing, I remember noticing specifically how careful the designers were in having players use up every bit of interesting content in a day after 45 minutes or an hour, so that eventually you'd run out of things to do, and that was the game's signal to put it down and pick it up again the next day. And I remember being struck by how intentional it was, and how humane it was... particularly given their goal of wanting to make a game that was asynchronously coop (where different family members could play in the same shared space at different times of day and interact asynchronously). As a game designer myself, I really respected the care they put into that.
Anyway, that's my immediate thought on seeing this (fascinating, valuable) experiment with LLM dialogue in Animal Crossing. The actual way NPCs work in these games as they are has been honed over time to serve a very specific function. It's very similar to personal testimonials by paid actors in commercials; a human expressing an idea in personal dialogue form triggers all sorts natural human attention and reception in us as audience members, and so it's a lot more sticky... but getting across the information quickly and concisely is still the primary point. Even dialogue trees in games are often not used because of their inefficiency.
I totally think that there will be fascinating innovations from the current crop of AI in games, and I'm really looking forward to seeing and trying them. I just think it's unlikely they will be drop-in replacements for a lot of the techniques that game developers have already honed for cases like informational NPC dialogue.
oh of course! Sorry, I was never trying to imply that that it was in any way realistic. For video games often the most fun / compelling choice is not the realistic one! Striving for realism can be a great goal and often has a lot of positives, but it is often limiting. Video games are just art, being photorealistic can be beautiful and amazing but is often not the best choice for expressing an idea.
That seems a bit like deck-chairs on the Titanic. The hard part isn't icon design, the hard part is (A) ensuring a clear list exists of what the NPC is supposed to ensure the user knows and (B) determining whether those goals were received successfully.
For example, imagine a mystery/puzzle game where the NPC needs to inform the user of a clue for the next puzzle, but the LLM-layer botches it, either by generating dialogue that phrases it wrong, or by failing to fit it into the first response, so that the user must always do a few "extra" interactions anyway "just in case."
I suppose you could... Feed the output into another document of "Did this NPC answer correctly" and feed it to another LLM... but down that path lies [more] madness.
EDIT: Also, having the LLM botch a clue occasionally could be a feature. E.g. a bumbling character that you might need to "interrogate" a bit before you actually get the clue in a way that makes sense, and can't be sure it's entirely correct. That could make some characters more realistic.
Basically you have your big clever LLM generating the outputs, and then you have your small dumb LLM reading them and going “did I understand that? Did it make sense?” - basically emulating the user before the response actually gets to the user. If it’s good, on it goes to the user, if not, the student queries Einstein with feedback to have another crack.
https://openai.com/index/prover-verifier-games-improve-legib...
Kind of like in real life...