Comment by bccdee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bccdee | Hacker News Reader

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There's an idea in game design called "negative possibility space." If your player walks to the end of a long hallway and it's a dead end, or they shimmy up a narrow ledge to the top of a building only to find nothing, they'll be disappointed. So either stick something interesting there, or block it off. This applies to NPC dialogue too. If an NPC can be spoken to, they should have something interesting to say. If they don't, you shouldn't be able to talk to them.

Giving a chatbot brain to an NPC who would otherwise only get a single generic line to say creates an infinite amount of negative possibility space. A player can waste a literally infinite amount of time probing a chatbot NPC for narratively interesting details, and all they'll get is chatbot slop. Now it doesn't matter if you put something interesting at the end of the hallway: You've wasted so much of the player's time now that they no longer trust you to. They assume you're just wasting their time. You teach your players to be cynical and incurious and to engage with your work as little as possible, because in their experience it's mostly meaningless.

For this reason, I consider the integration of chatbots into video games to fundamentally anti-artistic. It actively pushes players away from the work such that they get less out of it. Nobody wants this, actually. It sucks.

> A player can waste a literally infinite amount of time probing a chatbot NPC for narratively interesting details, and all they'll get is chatbot slop.

I would phrase that as "A player can have an infinite amount of fun creating an immersive world with the LLM". Any details you want will be narratively interesting, because the LLM will work them into the narrative as necessary.

There's no end of the hallway, the hallway leads to everything. The ultimate sandbox game.

The ultimate sandbox is way less fun than a nicely curated sandbox

For you. Minecraft wouldn't be a huge success if everyone shared your taste

Minecraft has extensive structure and curation to its experience.

It’s main draw is also typically sharing YOUR creations with other people.

The main draw for LLM-powered sandbox games will be sharing YOUR stories with other people.

There will also be extensive structure and curation to these games. It will just be elements that you can play with as you see fit, much like Minecraft.

Your examples of LLM integration is wildly inconsistent across your comments. I don’t believe you have an actual vision.

I think you're confused about curation and unlimited freedom being possible? Those are not at odds with each other. Game devs will provide a world that they enjoy creating stories in. They'll playtest characters and write their backstories and whatnot. Then they'll hand that curated world over to the players. The players are then free to experience the world "as intended", or create their own new ways of making stories in that world.

Minecraft doesn't have an LLM in it.

Here's why Minecraft works: It's an ecosystem full of carefully-designed areas and resources (biomes fine-tuned to generate specific types of landscape, enemies with focus-tested behaviours, items with particular abilities) which combine to form a sandbox where players can exercise ingenuity and build projects that satisfy their creative vision.

Where does generative AI fit into this? Should it be generating an infinite variety of dull and unoriginal items that don't do anything cool? Should it be building derivative-looking houses for players to ignore or burn down so that they can build their own houses in their place?

LLM-generated slop has no place in games. It is an obstacle to having a good time.

Before Minecraft came out, you'd be complaining about "Procedurally-generated slop", and saying there's no way a game like that would work.

LLMs won't generate items or houses (or at least be the primary source). They'll give the world agency, in a way that's straight up impossible now.

Like, maybe you screw someone over and they dedicate their lives to destroying you. Maybe you're just running around doing your thing and discover that the world has become embroiled in war all on their own. You can choose to join and fight, or play both sides, or just ignore it and keep adventuring. Maybe you're tired of adventuring and open up a flower shop, working your way up to creating a ruthless floral version of Standard Oil. Maybe you decide to kill the king and take his place, playing a game of cut-throat politics where people are constantly trying to backstab you. Then you decide, "Hey, I want to play as this other character and backstab my old self" and the LLM takes over your old character as you gleefully kill them off.

If none of that sounds interesting to you, then there's lots of other games to play and I'm sure you'll have fun. Those are all things that I can't wait to see happen.

> Before Minecraft came out, you'd be complaining about "Procedurally-generated slop", and saying there's no way a game like that would work.

People absolutely were complaining about this, with basically the same argument ("It's too much freedom! Players will get lost! They'll never get to the "goal" the artist sets!" etc)

Of course, that turned out to be silly

> Before Minecraft came out, you'd be complaining about "Procedurally-generated slop"

Before Minecraft came out, I played Nethack. No, I was never principally opposed to procgen games. However, there is such a thing as procedurally-generated slop. Good procgen games use a very fine-tuned algorithm to create engaging environments. Minecraft caves aren't fun to explore by accident; the algorithm was designed and tuned to consistently produce novel and fun layouts. Items and mobs were designed to specifically interact with those environments to lead to fun gameplay.

You're missing the insight that games featuring procedural generation are still designed. Bad design will lead to a bad game where the algorithm produces unfun gameplay. LLMs are not independently capable of good design. Games where LLMs are given agency over the player's experience won't be fun.

> maybe you screw someone over and they dedicate their lives to destroying you

And maybe it's really annoying and unpleasant, because the game is doing a bad job of telling that story. You're assuming it'll be good, but LLMs aren't smart enough to tell stories well or to understand what kind of gameplay will be enjoyable.

> You're missing the insight that games featuring procedural generation are still designed.

Best example of this is Spelunky, and this book goes into good detail: https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu

Gist is that Derek designed these playable mini rooms which were ultimately randomly stitched together.

LLMs are boring, though. Have you actually tried going to ChatGPT and asking it to tell you a story? It isn't entertaining. It isn't interesting. It's a waste of time.

Anything interesting will have to be provided by the player (as in a sandbox game) or by the designer (as in a conventional game), and at that point you've just ruined a perfectly good game by introducing an LLM to slather boring slop all over the interesting stuff the player or the designer has tried to do.

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