The better you make this infinite narrative generator, the more complicated the world gets and the less compelling it gets to actually interact with any one story.
Stories thrive by setting their own context. They should feel important to the viewer. An open world with infinite stories can't make every story feel meaningful to the player. So how does it make any story feel meaningful? I suppose the story would have to be global, in which case, it crowds out the potential for fractal infinite storylines - eventually, all or at least most are going to have to tie back to the Big Bad Guy in order to feel meaningful.
Local stories would just feel mostly pointless. In Minecraft, all (overworld) locales are equally unimportant. Much like on Earth, why should you care about the random place you appeared in the world? The difference is that on Earth you tend to develop community as you grow and builds connections to the place you live, which can build loyalty. In addition, you only have one shot, and you have real needs that you must fulfill or you die forever. So you develop some otherwise arbitrary loyalties in order to feel security in your needs.
In Minecraft there's zero pressure to develop loyalty to a place except for your own real-life time. And when that becomes a driving factor, why wouldn't you pick a game designed to respect your time with a self-contained story? (Not that infinite games like Minecraft are bad, but they aren't story-driven for a good reason).
Now, a game like Dwarf Fortress is different because you build the community, the infrastructure, the things that make you care about a place. But it already has infinite story generation without AI and I'm not sure AI would improve on that model.
- SimCity where you can read a newspaper about what's happening in your city that actually reflects the events that have occurred with interesting perspectives from the residents.
- Dwarf Fortress, but carvings, artwork, demons, forbidden beasts, etc get illustrations dynamically generated via stable diffusion (in the style of crude sketches to imply a dwarf made it perhaps?)
- Dwarf Fortress, again, but the elaborate in-game combat comes with a "narrative summary" which conveys first hand experiences of a unit in the combat log, which while detailed, can be otherwise hard to follow.
- Any fantasy RPG, but with a minstrel companion who follows you around and writes about what you do in a silly judgy way. The core dialogue could be baked in by the developers but the stories this minstrel writes could be dynamically generated based on the players actions. Example: "He was a whimsical one, who decided to take detour from his urgent hostage rescue mission to hop up and down several hundred times in the woods while trying on various hats he had collected. I have no idea what goes through this mans mind..."
I'm not sure if there is a word for it, but the kernel here is that everything is indirectly being dictated by the players actions and the games existing systems. The LLM/AI stuff isn't in charge of coming up with novel stories, and content, they are in charge of making the game more immersive and helping with the roleplay. I think this is the area they can thrive the most.
I'd say AAA games have been on track of "less fun" for at least half a decade. So this sounds like a natural next step.
OTOH, lots of games come with DLC that add new stories with the same mechanics. There might be some additions or changes, but if you really like the mechanics, you can try it with a different plot. Remnant II has sucked a ton of my time because of that.
How so?
I could totally see generative AI add a ton more variety to crowds, random ambient sentences by NPCs (that are often notoriously just a rotation of a handful of canned lines that get repetitive soon), terrain etc., while still being guided by a human-created high level narrative.
Imagine being able to actually talk your way out of a tricky situation in an RPG with a guard, rather than selecting one out of a few canned dialogue options. In the background, the LLM could still be prompted by "there's three routes this interaction can take; see which one is the best fit for what the player says and then guide them to it and call this function".
Worst case, you get a soulless, poorly written game with very eloquent but ultimately uninteresting characters. Some games are already that today – minus the realistic dialogue.
Yes, sure, but that's not what I was responding to. AI adding detail, not infinite quest lines, is possibly a good use case.
> Worst case, you get a soulless, poorly written game with very eloquent but ultimately uninteresting characters. Some games are already that today – minus the realistic dialogue.
Some games, yes... why do we want more of those? Anyway, that's not the worst case. Worst case is incomprehensible dialogue.
By definition, an infinite game is as boring as real life. To make it interesting, the engine must be able to search for a good story based on player actions. You can see this today already. Many games will guide the player into one or a few predefined stories. A better game would not have them predefined, but generated on-the-fly based on player actions.
But that doesn't translate well to websites, trailers or demos. It's easier to wow people with graphics.
(Dwarf Fortress being much more focused on generating a whole world.)
I'd say its less the work they have been trained on, and more what they have been reenforced to do, which is stay on topic. it causes them to dwell instead of drift.
It is like saying the paint brush and canvas lack creativity. Creativity is not a property of the tool, it is a property of the artist.
We also have a very poor understanding of human creativity from selection bias.
Last weekend I found a book at the library that was Picasso's drawings 1966 to 1968. There must have been 1000-1500 drawings in this book. Many were just half finished scribbles.
The average person seems to believe though that the master artist only produces masterpieces because they didn't bother to look at all the crap.
How is that different from humans? Do we get magic inspiration totally separate from anything we’ve learned?
Show me any great book, song, movie, building, sculpture, painting. I will tell you the influences the artist trained on.
I’m not going to claim this is Pulitzer-worthy, but it seems fairly novel:
> In Spiritfall: A Symphony of Rust and Rose Petals, readers traverse the borders of time, taste, and consciousness in a genre-bending epic that effortlessly fuses neo-noir detective intrigue, culinary magic realism, and post-biotechnological body horror under the simmering threat of a cosmic opera. Set in a floating, living city grown from engineered coral-harps, the story follows a taste-shaper detective tasked with unraveling the murder of an exiled goddess whose voice once controlled the city’s very tides. As he navigates sentient cooking knives, ink-washed memory fractals, and teahouses that serve liquid soul fragments, he uncovers conspiracies binding interdimensional dream-chefs to cybernetic shamans, and finds forbidden love in a quantum greenhouse of sentient spices. Every chapter refracts expectations, weaving together genres never before dared, leaving readers both spellbound and strangely hungry for more.
If I were using this for real I’d ask it to iterate, to create a story arc, etc.
I'd be curious if it could explain those concepts and use them in consistent ways. If so, I'd be curious how novel it could really get. Is it just going to be repackaging well-trod scifi and fantasy devices, or studied philosophy? Or could it offer us a story with truly new understandings? For example, to my knowledge, House of Leaves is something truly novel. It's probably not the first book with intentional printing errors, or with layered narration, or with place-horror, etc. But I think House of Leaves is pretty widely considered a sort of "step forward" for literature, having a profound impact on the reader unlike anything that came before it.
(A really serious discussion will require analyzing exactly what that impact is and how it's novel.)
I’m not sure “can produce good outputs, can produce terrible outputs” is a good way to differentiate humans and LLMs.
LLMs have no life experiences, are only familiar with the most mainstream literary works with the most mainstream internet discussions, and use a fancy RNG formula on the next most likely word as a not so great substitute for imagination.
Procgen games mainly work when the procedural parts are just a foundation for hand-crafted content to sit on, whether that's crafted by the players (as in Minecraft) or the developers (as in No Mans Sky after they updated it a hundred times, or Rougelikes in general).
I haven't added any words or phrases to it in years, but I still use it regularly and somehow it still surprises me. Maybe the Spelunky-type approach can be surprising for longer; that is, make a bunch of hand-curated bits and pick from them randomly: https://tinysubversions.com/spelunkyGen/
Those beautiful worlds took a lot of money to make and the studios are smart enough to realize consumers are apathetic/stupid enough to accept much lower quality assets.
The top end of the AAA market will use this sparingly for the junk you don't spend much time on - stuff the intern was doing before.
The bottom of the market will use this for virtually everything in their movie-to-game pipeline of throwaway games. These are the games designed just to sucker parents and kids out of $60 every month. The games that don't even follow the story of the movie and likely makes the story worse.
Strangely enough this is where the industry makes the vast majority of it's day-to-day walking around cash.
It's a great idea. We want more than an open-world. We want an open-story.
Open-story games are going to be the next genre that will dominate the gaming industry, once someone figures it out.
"There’s no question in my mind that such software could generate reasonably good murder mysteries, action thrillers, or gothic romances. After all, even the authors of such works will tell you that they are formulaic. If there’s a formula in there, a deep learning AI system will figure it out.
Therein lies the fatal flaw: the output will be formulaic. Most important, the output won’t have any artistic content at all. You will NEVER see anything like literature coming out of deep learning AI. You’ll see plenty of potboilers pouring forth, but you can’t make art without an artist.
This stuff will be hailed as the next great revolution in entertainment. We’ll see lots of prizes awarded, fulsome reviews, thick layers of praise heaped on, and nobody will see any need to work on the real thing. That will stop us dead in our tracks for a few decades."
Until then, I'll stick with human art
For now though, it's very good at making thing similar to what's already made.
"Here's a photo of me and my wife, draw me and my wife as a cowboy in the style of a Dilbert cartoon shooting a gun in the air" can't be done by AI as far as I know, which is why artist are still employed throughout the world.
Jackie Chan is not a good example because he's a famous person it may have been trained on. I used myself as an example because it would be something that is novel to the AI, it would not be able to rely on it's training to draw me, as I am not famous.
I think fully conversational games (voice to voice) with dynamic story lines are only a decade or two away, pending a minor breakthrough in model distillation techniques or consumer inference hardware. Unlike self driving cars or AGI the technology seems to be there, it’s just so new no one has tried it. It’ll be really interesting to see how game designers and writers will wrangle this technology without compromising fun. They’ll probably have to have a full agentic pipeline with artificial play testers running 24/7 just to figure out the new “bugspace”.
Can’t wait to see what Nintendo does, but that’s probably going to take a decade.
You're not gonna get new intriguing stories from AI which only regurgitates what it's stolen. You're going to get a themeless morass without intention.
I also find it amusing how your example to Siri uses one of the oldest pieces of literature when you also tire of stories heard a thousand times before.
> We collected a vocabulary consisting of about 1500 basic words, which try to mimic the vocabulary of a typical 3-4 year-old child, separated into nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In each generation, 3 words are chosen randomly (one verb, one noun, and one adjective). The model is instructed to generate a story that somehow combines these random words into the story
You can do the same for generating worlds, just prepare good ingredients and sample at random.
These are “stories” in the most vacuous definition possible, one that is just “and then this happened” like a child’s conception of plot
For LLMs like GPT-4, this all seems reasonable to account for and assume the LLM is capable of processing, given appropriate guidance/frameworks (of which may be just classical programming).
Yes. This is an active research area. See https://github.com/yingpengma/Awesome-Story-Generation, which is not up to date.
When did we start thinking this way? That things HAVE to get better and in fact to think otherwise is very negative? Is HN under a massive hot hand fallacy delusion?
Sure, progress will likely not be linear or without challenges, but we already have the human brain as proof that it is possible.
If game assets are cheap to generate you’ll see small teams or even solo developers willing to take more creative risks
So I see the most likely outcome is a lot of dogshit and Steam being forced to make draconian moves to protect the integrity of the store.
I don’t see why AI will be any different. All that’s changed is ratio of potential creators to the general population. Most of it is going to be slop regardless because of economic incentives.
If AI pushes that up to 98%, that means you have to look through 5 times as much crap to get the good stuff.
Expect something similar if video games, interactive 3D is cheap to produce.
Filtering is a much easier problem to solve and abundance a preferable scenario.
It seems like it’d be more useful to have the model generate the raw artifacts, world map, etc. and let the engine do the actual rendering.
That’s actually a use case I can understand- and what’s more I think that humans could generate training data (story “prototypes”?) that somehow (?) expand the phase space of story-types
Ironic though - we can build AI that could be creative but it’s humans that have to use science and logic because AI cannot?
Consider EVE Online. The stories it generates are Shakespearean and I defy anyone to argue that they have no plot.
I would go further and predict that stories generated by sufficiently advanced AI can explore much more interesting story landscapes because they need not be bound by the limitations of human experience. Consider what stories can be generated by an AI which groks mathematics humans don't yet fully understand?
Now, imagine training it on thousands of hours of PoV drone footage from Ukraine, and then using that to train autonomous agents.
For example, right now if you save an entire village from an attacking tribe of orcs, only a handful of NPCs even say anything, just a nice little "thanks for saving our town!" and then 2 villages over the NPCs are completely unaware of a mighty hero literally solo tanking an entire invading army.
Why is that?
Well you'd need lots of, somewhat boring but important, dialogue written, and you'd need tons of voice lines recorded.
Both those are now solvable problems with generative AI. AI generated dialogue is now reasonably high quality, not "main character story arc" high quality, but "idle shop keeper chit chat" quality for sure, it won't break immersion at least. And the quality of writing from AI is fine for 2 or 3 sentences here and there.
I'll be soon releasing a project showing this off at https://www.tinytown.ai/ the NPC dialogue is generated on a small LLM that can be ran locally, and the secret of even high quality voice models is that they don't require a lot of memory to run.
I predict that in another 4 or 5 years we'll see a lot of models ran at the edge on video game consoles and home PCs, fleshing out game worlds.
To me this basically describes God, once you get all the mods and DLC.
We should celebrate creation of tools and capabilities, while also acknowledging that there are many layers yet to be completed before your very cool ad hoc video game request can be delivered.
Star Wars isn't great- but if a single company didn't own Star Wars we'd likely see some companies competing with really great Star Wars stuff- and others sucking at it. The issue is economic.
Dwarf fortress?
Are there any game developers working on infinite story games? I don’t care if it looks like Minecraft, I want a Minecraft that tells intriguing stories with infinite quest generation. Procedural infinite world gen recharged gaming, where is the procedural infinite story generation?
Still, awesome demo. I imagine by the time my kids are in their prime video game age (another 5 years or so) we will be in a new golden age of interactive story telling.
Hey siri, tell me the epic of Gilgamesh over 40 hours of gameplay set 50,000 years in the future where genetic engineering has become trivial and Enkidu is a child’s creation.