For example, the more realistic human character animations get, the deeper we seem to fall into the uncanny valley. The fact is that humans themselves naturally move in ways that look weird when put on a stage, so mocap tends to look sillier the better it is. Which is why we have theater, where movements are exaggerated.
Anyway, with AI characters, I expect it will actually be more frustrating and boring than not if they have realistic lives and schedules. All the littler irritations that we deal with and accept form real people just become friction in a game. Games, as movies and books and shows and plays and illustrations, don't need to be more realistic to be better. Media is caricatures of real life, with important information intentionally presented to give us a good experience. Taking inspiration from real life can give us better mechanics but blindly mimicking real life will give us shitty games.
I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them, just like they have with every other computer technology over the last 40 years.
You'd be surprised at how untrue that is, unfortunately.
> I'm pretty confident that people will find ways to make fun and interesting games using them
I agree - but also, that's a different phenomenon than simply inserting AI naturalistic characters and expecting them to be fun to interact with.
Games bend over backwards in a million ways not to be realistic even when they seem realistic: from silently helping your odds, to intentionally breaking physics (see: coyote running in platformers), to helping your movement align with enemies.
Even the most realistic games with human locomotion almost all rely unrealistic ankle-breaking acceleration changes for your character because you'd feel like you were piloting a bowl of soup otherwise.
The reason we don't have full agentic NPCs right now isn't a technical limitation: it just wouldn't be fun.
Usually you're the hero going against impossible odds with NPCs, in the real world you'd just die.
Games like GTA constantly have NPCs saying outlandish but comical quips at a rate that far surpasses real life.
Hard coded NPC behaviors in games often become the defining features of those games
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There's nothing wrong with realizing that outside of very narrow context like simulator physics, people generally don't seek out realism in our entertainment. People want a certain degree of escapism that relies on breaking the rules a little, or in the case of NPCs a lot.
The questions is not, "Is there a level of realism that is unfun," because duh, of course there is. The question is, "Will new advances in AI allow game developers to bring life to NPCs in a way previously not possible, that's also fun." And duh, of course it will.
Pointing out ways that increased realism can be unfun does nothing to prove that there are no ways in which it can be fun. Y'all are betting against the creativity of the entire game development industry. Absolutely wild.
I expect AI will be used to scale dialogue options, NPC model assortments, NPC voices, etc. to an amazing degree too at build time.
But realtime "Large Transformer Models", to generate how NPCs act is almost a "duh no one will want that", when you can get 99% of the benefits by baking the output of gen AI in the game with none of the drawbacks like losing the shared experience of a game or playing roulette with the quality of someone's experience.
AI would let you bake in insanely intricate dialogue trees today
You're making tremendous assumptions here:
- That the shared experience of game is always more fun than individual experiences.
- That only 1% of benefits can come from real-time AI decision-making.
- That using AI will mean playing roulette with experience, AND that playing roulette can never be fun.
I would bet all the money on earth that game developers will prove you wrong in each of these areas over the course of the next 3-5 years.
At first, devs start using generative AI for NPC interactions. It forces you to keep Internet connection and it feels extremely laughable. Everyone hates it.
Then 3 years later it becomes so natural that every AAA game has generative AI, and no one even mentions that as if that was always how games were made.
Can you name any games built around the Y-combinator, CRDTs, or PCA? (Please oh please let there be games about principal component analysis.)
I remember Ultima V in the 80s had this. NPCs had their own daily routine and went here and there throughout the day. A couple of side quests relied on this mechanic—you had to learn their schedule and catch them somewhere at some time.
I think it depends on the type of game you have, but I wouldn't underestimate this type of technology for say, open world games where it might make the game more immersive due to convincing realism.
I think you misread my posts. We don't have awkward animations because our mocap isn't good enough, we have awkward animations because typical human motion looks awkward - our brains just mostly ignore that.
People are awkward; we don't actually want characters in games/movies/etc to be like real people. Very few movies, for example, would be well served by conversations frequently and for non-plot-related reasons being interrupted by loud noises, having people talk over each other and nonverbally try to figure out who gets to speak, having characters ask "What?" and then begin to reply without waiting for the answer because their brain caught up half a second later, etc.
But I don’t think I can agree with what you meant then - why would our brain mostly ignore it in real life but not in video games? Where is the transition from something feeling real (in an immersive way) to us not liking it because it feels awkward, and why does it happen? I’m imagining a “perfect simulation” game which is like real life in ways that matter/don’t get in your way in terms of gameplay - I think everyone would be awed (of course this can be argued though). What would need to degrade in terms of realism for it to seem awkward/not be immersive anymore?
I agree with the movie example, but in a game you don’t have to watch the mundane - it’s just background “noise” to make the world believable.
That being said, I've noticed that realism in games has a function beyond gameplay: it makes the game cooler.
For example in Rainworld, the enemies keep doing their own thing even when you aren't around. This has some gameplay value (makes the game less predictable), but I think the main value is that people talk about it and think it's interesting. So it changes people's perception of the game world in a positive way.
Another game that has this property (and that has somehow escaped the befuddled reviewers' ire) is Don't Starve. e.g. I once got chased by the Deerclops and ran through a Beefalo herd. After a while I realised the Deerclops wasn't hunting me anymore. Next day I went back to the Beefalo herd and there was a huge amount of meat and Beefalo wool, and a Deerclops eye, lying around.
After playing games like that, I play e.g. Hollow Knight, or Zero Dawn, where every enemy you kill comes back the next time you revisit the area and it feels so fake.
- Ability to reload when you fail
- You can choose your gender
- Actually, be anything. A dwarf, elf, dog, tall, short, muscled, etc...
- Novel physics (magic)
- Sooooo much more
"context": {"Go about your daily life, but you have an IQ of 50 and have zero ambition."}
Crafting instructions that lead to NPC's working to achieve a goal that wasn't anticipated, and provides you with a resource that couldn't otherwise be had in the game, will be a whole new aspect to gaming, and inspire a desire to experiment and explore.
Seriously, have you no imagination? Why sit around coming up with reasons it won't work instead of ways to make it fun?
> Then we'll make new kinds of games where the unpredictability of the NPCs is a core mechanic.
This is impossible, you need the NPC to be predictable on some level to make a fun game. Even unpredictable NPC needs to have a predictable personality on some level, total randomness isn't fun. Like, imagine a terrain generator that just randomizes terrain on each tile, that wont be fun at all, that is what a basic random personality would be like.
Think of a human opponent, they are very predictable, just looking at a human player and what he does and I can predict what he will do in the future. Not perfectly, but players aren't that random. To make an AI that feels good it has to be very predictable.
The main problem with "smart" bots is that they have so far always been way less predictable than humans, they get a strange edge cases and bugs where they start to act very dumb and strangely, that feels like a bug to the player and isn't fun. Or their smartness makes them do the same thing every time making them even more predictable than basic scripting, either way they are worse than basic scripting.
Getting over these issues is a really hard problem, LLMs hasn't helped solve that so far.
tongue in cheek counterpoint: Rimworld players love Random Randy :P
I think it really depends on the game though, but you're right 100% random in an RPG could be really annoying.
Right now I'm into games like Factorio and Captain of Industry and they've both recently had blog posts about how they do terrain generation and CoI stuck out because you can manually plop features like mountains and then it procedurally generates the mountain range[1].
There's been a lot of games recently that seem to be doing procedural land generation, is there not a way this can be applied to AI personalities as well or is there no overlap between them? It kind of feels like procedurally generated personalities should be do-able but it sounds like there's something more going on that complicates that?
Even randy random isn't entirely random, people love it since it sends you big threats, so it is coded to ensure it throws you big threats. If it randomly didn't send big waves people wouldn't like it as much.
"If Randy has not fired a major threat after 13 days, the next Randy fired event becomes a major threat."
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Randy_Random
> There's been a lot of games recently that seem to be doing procedural land generation, is there not a way this can be applied to AI personalities as well or is there no overlap between them?
I'm certain that is possible, but we don't have nearly as much intuitive understanding how to generate full fledged personalities hooked into an LLM that changes how the character acts and his motivations etc that will actually work well when put in a world and interacting with other NPC's in that world.
Terrain is just really easy to generate well enough, almost everything else is way harder.
Diplomacy in games have always been terrible because it just comes down to preprogrammed numbers. Humans might be the same at the very base level but there’s no way we could code that all out.
Now you could truly make those leaders act like they “should.”
If you're making a highly interactive, dynamic game, you don't even need detailed language for NPC interaction. You may as well use simple templates or even symbols.
Surely you've met some of these pessimists before.
On the other hand, I've loved co-op games. Maybe (it's a big maybe) I'd enjoy an AI driven NPC co-op character. It assumes they can get them good enough to be fun to play with, do what you want, etc. Player: "Let's go to the castle", NPC: "See you layer I'm going to the bar". You either follow the NPC or play without it.
But again, that's where LLMs can thrive! Currently if I want to play anything co-operatively I have to either convince my partner or friends to pick up the game and care about it, or hope that the existing community of players is such that I'm not spending what can be a very uncomfortable time trying to relate to kids/teens or toxic adults. If all the NPCs were driven by LLMs whereby I could modulate their play-style, personality, drive/ambition I could be looking at genuinely stimulating, creative, and original "co-op" experiences from bots.