But it's extremely difficult to see any kind of procedurally created game being able to create the sort of experience you get with a really good GM.
It is the difference between writing a story together or playing along in someone else's story.
A 100% this, a good GM actually doesn't really know much about where the story is going -- you play to find out what happens. I also have a hard time imagining an automated DM effectively 'failing forward'. Every skill check players make should change the game state, pass or fail.
Never, ever let your players roll the dice and tell them "Sorry, you don't see anything". Every check should be an opportunity to move the story... somehow.
The GM's role is to create and simulate the universe, and to fudge the simulation (and the players) a little to keep it entertaining.
And (sufficient) simulation is definitely something we can hope to do -- though few games really try.
But the automation has a slightly different role than your GM.. it's goal is not to "move the story forward", but rather to craft a universe so interesting the players will move forward on their own! The automation should not be rolling to find out whether something is behind the door.. it should simply be checking if the simulated creature has wandered there.
The drudgery of true simulation then must be mitigated, and the tools for mitigation are the job of the game designer and the hueristics of the simulation. That is, you need not simulate the atom, nor the food & lifecycles; just enough of the system to allow it to change and adapt on its own (and ideally be self-stabilizing to a degree; probably best done by acknowledging the players only explore a single dungeon, but it's affected by a world outside of it; this is the opportunity to inject whatever corrections are necessary to stabilize the environment, avoiding the problems of Ultima Online)
> The automation should not be rolling to find out whether something is behind the door.. it should simply be checking if the simulated creature has wandered there.
The better example is the GM deciding if there's anything interesting that could be behind the door. If yes, then you're rolling to find out the terms of the engagement. If no, if it's not interesting, then you're done. There's nothing behind the door.
To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little way off from that.
Yes, making the mistake of the mediocre GM -- trying to lead the player(s) into following your story, instead of enabling them to create their own. The ideal GM (at least, for me, someone who strongly prefers ADnD to DnD5) maximizes player agency, while constraining it by the rules of the universe (and also operating as a manager, because you're dealing with meatbags where one guy will happily try to spend 5 hours dicking around in the bar when the rest of the party wants to go to the dungeon, and another idiot will be trying to "troll" the group, in the most uninteresting fashion).
The core narrative (and every GM inherently brings with him a narrative he wants to tell) is incentivized, in much the same way any open world videog-game RPG has a main questline, but the ideal GM allows for departure from it as long as its interesting.
The narrative-focused GM, and RPG, will only allow such a deviation so far as it doesn't detract from the main narrative, because there is only one narrative the GM has interest in telling.
Narrative-focused RPGs may be the current trend, but that doesn't make it a good trend.
>To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little way off from that.
You're correct, but my point is that we don't actually need, or even really want that, for our imaginary automaton.
Humans, by their nature, will bring the emotional impact, and fill in the details of the narrative, entirely on their own, if they are enabled to do so. They will assign personalities to blank-slate NPCs, they will craft their own reasons for doing whatever they do, they will spin their own tale, so long as the system will allow it (and as long as its sufficiently limited; for whatever reason, limitations breed creativity). You just need to provide an environment that reacts to the players, and sufficiently interesting ways for the player to interact with the environment.
Give them a gravity/portal gun and players will come up with all kinds of stories..
In a tabletop, the GM enables the reactive behaviors of what would otherwise be a static map. In a cRPG, lacking the GM, you get a static map (except for very specifically defined reactions, usually determined by narrative events). In most open world rpgs, you get a large map and multiple narratives, but still rather static. In a simulation, you get the reactive environment; the closer the RPG approximates a simulation, the closer we get to the GM's role -- to react to player input (rather than prescribe it)
This is in much the same way that any game can be fun if you toss in multiplayer, and give players sufficient controls -- the players will do all the hard work of setting goals, spinning tales, emotionally attaching themselves to arbitrary constructs.
Games don't need narratives, they need agency. Then the narratives come for free.
The current trend enables player agency because the table as a group decides the narrative, not just the GM. It's about the table as a whole deciding what it most narratively interesting to happen right now.
What's worrying to me is that most good GMs were at one point mediocre GMs. If they get replaced by a computer, we will end up with fewer good GMs.
I suppose this is the same complaint weavers had 100s of years ago about automated looms.
One thing I think everyone may want to consider is that the current experiments with GPT-2 aren't necessarily the only way to use it. It's just that it happens by its structure that feeding it "all the text up to this point" and asking it to generate the next words is really easy to make into a snazzy web demo. But you could also do things like try to set up a vector representation of some space and turn it loose on that. If it's prone to its mind wandering, you might be able to confine it to a particular place in the hyperspace or something. This may require more novel research (especially around how a human being finds the place they want to use in the rather complicated space) and a deep understanding of the algorithm, and perhaps it is impractical in the end. But it's at least something that could be tried. We are not confined to merely using it as a glorified chatbot as it has been.