cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/[email protected]/p/1004331/ai-driving-game-players-are-burning-through-so-many-tokens-its-developer-had-to-take-out-a
The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.
I think that it would be highly dependant on how the AI model is trained and what genre of game it is implemented into. For example, games that more heavily rely on dialogue or social interaction.
Take Danganronpa, which is a series if linear narrative games about students trapped in a school forced to kill each other (and get way with it) to escape. You as the player have to investigate each murder and arrive at who the culprit was to win the game. They are fun on your first playthrough, but on any subsequent playthrough you already know the solutions. Like playing Clue but the game only ever has one outcome: Mr. Green, in the Library, with the Lead Pipe. You wouldn’t even have to open the game box and you already know. Absolutely zero replayability.
With an AI in such a game, you could have a new gamemode, like a New Game+, which players can play after the hand-crafted story. This is where I think something like a very carefully trained LLM could be useful, because it could create these kinds of situations at random, making them unpredictable and therefore adding replay value. Now, I don’t think AI is currently sufficiently advanced for this use, but if it continues to develop I could see that niche making good use of it.
Nah
First of all, video games, including detective adventure games with randomised riddles to solve and different endings, have been done for quite some time, long before llms. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game) . You don’t need a language model for that. Just be passionate about the project.
Second, the whole idea of a video game like that is to tell a story. The last thing I would want is randomised bullshit to click through, wondering all the time if what I’m reading is even still within the boundaries of what the developers wanted or if the llm was already going off the rails. And that’s not even considering the shale feeling of consuming not some created, curated story but merely the condensed diarrhea of stolen work.
No thanks.