GPT-4 Used To Create An Enthralling Star Trek: The Next Generation Game, See It In Action
Redditors are using GPT-4 to make text adventure games based on Star Trek.
What if the best Star Trek video game ever created is one that doesn’t have any graphics? That may sound crazy, but a recent Reddit user used GPT-4 to create an interactive text game based on Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s the next best thing to using the holodeck for fans who just can’t wait for that next episode of Star Trek: Picard, and you can use their instructions to create your own awesome interactive adventure.
If you’ve never used GPT-4 before, you might wonder just how the heck it could create a Star Trek game. Basically, you have a conversation with an AI, and you can ask it questions about what it does and does not know (which is how this user got started: by asking what the bot knew about Star Trek: The Next Generation and its characters). From there, you can give it special instructions, and this Reddit user asked the program to create a text-based game (complete with hidden response options) where he is a newly-assigned ensign under the command of Captain Picard when the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters a new alien life form and he must go to the bridge and get a piece of the action.
The original Reddit user and many of the commenters mentioned how interesting it will be when GPT-4 can pair graphics with the text adventures it is creating for Star Trek: The Next Generation and other fun fandoms. This is somewhat ironic because younger fans and gamers are impatient for AI to bring us closer to the kinds of modern games that we currently play. However, older fans and gamers will likely appreciate how much these text-based adventures resemble early professional games such as Zork that were built around their own stories as well as countless fan-made MUDs and MUCKs that helped them recreate and interact with their favorite fandoms.
Of course, as cool as GPT-4 was at creating a Star Trek: The Next Generation game for the original user, some who tried to follow in his footsteps ran into some unexpected (and somewhat hilarious) problems. For example, one fan decided to create a game based on the superior show Deep Space Nine (yeah, that’s right, we said it), and things were going well until the player decided to join the anti-Cardassian resistance group The Maquis, the same choice made by Trek characters ranging from Ensign Ro to Commander Chakotay.
At this point, the AI informed the player that it “cannot encourage or promote joining any extremist or illegal group” (it seems, like Commander Data himself, that GPT-4 has its own ethical subroutines that sometimes get in the way of potential fun).
Ultimately, even if we can’t make the right decision and join the Maquis, we’re eager to discover all the different ways that GPT-4 can help us become part of our favorite Star Trek adventures like we never have before. And we can’t help but wonder if this might help future showrunners and scriptwriters create better episodes. Just think: if Paramount had access to this tool, maybe it wouldn’t have taken Star Trek: Picard two seasons to finally start giving us a decent show.
