AI Is Being Used To Create The Greatest Choose Your Own Adventure Game Ever
AI technology is being used to create a choose-your-own-adventure game with infinite possibilities.
Thanks to the power of AI—which has grown significantly in the past two years—the text-based gaming genre is making a comeback. Gamers and gaming developers are now using AI generators to create the greatest choose-your-own-adventure games ever. This goes beyond the use of this controversial technology to craft gaming art, as was the case with High on Life, a game that knows when players are cheating.
According to IGN, game makers are now using AI language models, such as ChatGPT, to create text-based Role Playing Games—one of the oldest genres in gaming. Choices players make are the foundation of text-based games, and they affect the particular game’s outcome. However, all the choices and outcomes are predetermined by the developers, making them ultimately limited. But what would happen if the choices you’re given aren’t predetermined or limited because the story isn’t fully written yet? That’s where AI models come in.
With typical text-based games, players are offered a set of predetermined choices, which can further affect the gameplay and storyline. However, considering that all choices are predetermined, players are actually given an illusion of choice. So, when you face a band of goblins in a traditional text-based game, you might need to fight them to get their loot and unlock subsequent choice sets. But AI language models, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, have the ability to guide text-based game play as long as they’re given a specific set of parameters.
AI is capable of writing the story based on the choices you make instead of offering limited choices which were predetermined by one of the game’s possible endings or determining the outcome of your choice through random number generation—the latter is more akin to tabletop dice games. In other words, for the first time in a gaming environment, you’re granted free will to make any choice you want. Nick Walton, the creator of AI Dungeon Generator, for example, befriended the aforementioned band of goblins and performed at festivals after forming a musical band with them.
Text-based RPGs aren’t as widespread nowadays, and they’re mostly enjoyed by a small community of retrogamers. However, their massive influence on the RPG genre can’t be understated, as its various elements can be seen throughout the rest of the gaming industry. Each and every RPG game, ranging from 1981’s Wizardry to games such as Might and Magic, the recently remastered Mass Effect, and Cyberpunk 2077, are all choice-based games built upon the legacy of text-based RPGs.
AI language models are disruptive to almost every industry; it’s used to make a movie, it learned how to play Stratego—becoming the top-ranking player—and it even passed a law exam. It’s used by various industries, despite unanswered ethical questions associated with its use, and now AI is used by game-makers to make games. While we’re probably decades away from seeing its full implementations in gaming, the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence feel more and more like the famous James Cameron movie—which is also getting another brand-new game.
