, PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One Obsidian Entertainment
at aidungeon.io, AI Dungeon, Nick Walton
EVERY couple of weeks, my friends and I gather to imagine the future. Well, a future: we play a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) adapted from Carbon 2185 that is set in a cyberpunk, post-Brexit London where corporations run everything. Think Dungeons & Dragons meets Blade Runner meets an unending howl at the current state of the UK.
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Recently, our team was tasked with infiltrating a factory, planting a virus to erase crucial data and getting out undetected. I play as Reginald Archibald Thistlewaite, a mash-up of Sherlock Holmes and UK politician Jacob Rees-Mogg. I have designed him to be persuasive and charismatic, so I decided to talk my way in, posing as an inspector.
With a few lucky rolls of the dice, I was able to convince the factory manager that a robot uprising was imminent, and only by accessing his computer could we ensure his safety. The mission went off without a hitch.
What was so thrilling is that all of this was completely unplanned. Since TTRPGs take place largely in your shared imagination, almost anything can happen. One player, the dungeon master, takes on the task of running the game world, depicting non-player characters and adapting to whatever the players throw at them.
鈥淔or video games to truly match tabletop role-playing games, they need to get intelligent鈥�
Video games can鈥檛 do this, as your options are preprogrammed by developers, but some have more choices than others. I have been playing The Outer Worlds, which casts you as an escapee from a colonist ship in the Halcyon star system, where corporations run everything. Hey, that sounds familiar鈥�
The game is utterly gorgeous, full of amazing space vistas and weird alien worlds, but what really strikes me are the dialogue options. Most games give you choices that boil down to 鈥測es鈥� or 鈥渘o鈥�, but The Outer Worlds opts for much deeper conversations.
So far, my favourite moment involved taking one of my companions, an engineer named Parvati, for a drink in a space station bar. She had received a romantic poem from a woman she was attracted to, but as an asexual person, she wasn鈥檛 interested in physical advances. Thanks to my conversational skills, I convinced her to pursue the relationship on her terms, while steering her away from getting too drunk.
Later, I met a shopkeeper who was forced to wear a giant moon mask by the corporation he worked for. I pestered him about how the mask felt, and his responses became increasingly hilarious 鈥� and desperate 鈥� as he tried to bring the conversation back to me buying something.
Of course, for video games to truly match TTRPGs, they need to get intelligent. I am excited by the promise of AI Dungeon, an AI-generated text adventure based on the Elon Musk-backed GPT-2 AI. This hit the headlines earlier this year for being 鈥渢oo dangerous鈥� to release to the public. That is obvious hyperbole, but it can generate pretty convincing text from a short prompt.
Nick Walton, the creator of AI Dungeon, sets up a handful of initial scenarios and actions, then lets the AI fill in the blanks. It is mostly nonsense, but passable nonsense 鈥� you can play and have fun. AI Dungeon will only get more advanced as computing power grows and we feed in ever-larger data sets. Think of the thousands of hours of TTRPG sessions on YouTube that are yet to be mined. I wouldn鈥檛 stop meeting my friends, but an AI dungeon master could be the ultimate video game.
