Hacker News Reader

Comment by itishappy | Hacker News Reader

> How much time did people spend actually engaging with the deep and thoughtful narrative in Skyrim? And how much did they spend just enjoying the world?

Ah, but the world of Skyrim is itself the deep and thoughtful narrative. It has been painstakingly crafted to give the characters, locations, and history meaning and interest. Only the barest minimum amount of freedom is then sprinkled on top in the form of player agency. The consistency is what makes it so interesting!

For an AI generated story, you'll need to find a way to ensure everything stays coherent. If I convince a random farmer that it's in his best interest to try to kill the king or marry the mayor's daughter, but come back the next week to find him contentedly plowing his field again, my immersion is broken and my day is ruined! I suspect that giving this level of freedom to NPCs will make crafting a stable (playable) world difficult to impossible.

View on HN

Thought of a better example: The Underdark.

Stumbling into the Underdark by accident is an amazing feeling, because it's obviously an important location from a quest that you don't have yet! Exposition and intrigue, how fun!

I can't imagine a way to do this nicely with generative AI. If I thoroughly explore the king's palace before sending in my farmer-come-assassin friend, how will it know that the gallows are to be an important location later?

Maybe while humans are designing the map, we could flag some interesting landmarks, and then if the NPCs engage with them somehow, info about them could be built into their prompts.

Maybe Skyrim was a bad example because it is too designed. But like, Minecraft barely has a plot, and it was really popular. Maybe we can add, like, a couple good characters to open world survival crafting games. We don’t have to skip straight to simulating whole cities.

So firstly, I think there’s a sliding scale here, between structured narrative and hands-off emergent storytelling.

If we assume something in the middle:

While we might not be able to predict that you’ll encourage the farmer to (try to) overthrow the king, we might predict that you’ll try something of that sort. Maybe you enlist a guard for an inside job, or perhaps you do it yourself! But if we want to plan for it, we can plant the seeds, and then nudge the GPT to weave the threads of our story together when it happens.

Interestingly, because GPT requires so little prompting for relatively intricate story lines, (yes, really), you can probably add an ungodly number of these semi-scripted moments. I think they would be absolutely magical.

I think all of that would add up to a world that feels alive, with deep world building and many ‘surprising but inevitable’ moments – and the potential for some great emergent storytelling along the way.

I’m very excited for it!

Yeah, I think the AI can’t be the simulation. There needs to be a conventional game under it. If you convince the farmer to go kill the king right this instant, the AI could order that pawn to go try and do it, combat mechanics happen, and then you have a dead farmer, a slightly bruised guard, and an empty farm.

I mean, we have lots of fun in much dumber worlds, where the peak of NPC design is bots that walk from their jobs to their homes at certain times of day. And maybe something slightly more advanced will fall into an uncanny valley (we probably don’t have the technology to simulate an AI farmer following your advice to take part in a grand conspiracy to kill the king).

Agreed! My fear is too much NPC agency will lead to exactly what we see in the real world: conflict. Great, that's the interesting bit! I just worry that without careful planning we'll be facing an NPC battle-royale, and an empty map isn't a particularly fun one.

Of course, it is a high bar that most game companies could get nowhere near, but Dwarf Fortress already makes an interesting world dynamically. Maybe an LLM could be dropped into that world to give it some characters.

With current LLMs, I'd worry about the opposite. ChatGPT and Dungeons always ends up with it insisting problems be solved non-violently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com