Tom Nook didn't need a down payment either.

You should be able to run Cheat Engine on your emul*tor of choice to tweak New Leaf "and newer" titles.

And if you're a stickler for pissing Nintendo off in very specific ways, LayeredFS + Atmosphere opens up some modding opportunities right on the console itself. Not sure how easy it would be to pull something like this off though...

There is something to be said for a comment talking about "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions", whilst falling into a major bug bear many have with Reddit, commenting before reading the source...

That's essentially what it does, being prompted with a progression from:

> "Stay normal unless prompted. Avoid overt references to debt unless it comes up naturally."

all the way to:

> "Openly agitate for change. Use fiery language (still PG) and talk about reclaiming fairness from Nook's shop and loans."

Source: https://github.com/vuciv/animal-crossing-llm-mod/blob/cc9b6b...

Thankfully, I am in my 30s, and I don't have to interact with anybody in real life who mostly regurgitates Reddit jokes. Either I'm lucky or I've made some good choices. Probably the former.

>which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems

Can they?

Generative AI can reason in novel problems in an analogous way that bands continue to make new melodies even after all these years using the same instruments as all the other bands in their genre.

As far as I know, no current gen model AI "thinks". It's all processes trained against a body of work generated by actual thinkers along with a bevy of smoke and mirrors to fill in the gaps.

It's amazing that it's as good as it is given how far it is from thinking, but if you threw something actually novel at it, all it would do is confidently word salad a response.

> Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything

I am exactly saying that they have no thoughts or even "thoughts".

> which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems

There are many decades of pre-LLM software that can solve novel problems. Thought (or novel thought) is required to reason, but it's not required to solve a problem.

For example, there are exhaustive algorithms that can solve novel equations and even complete simple mathematical proofs, but they don't need to think.

> "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

You don't, and I don't care if you do or not. The value of my comment isn't its novelty or whether it's truly reasoned, which is why LLMs sometimes do create valuable output.

In fact, the output of a reasoning machine (whether a human brain or true AGI, sometime in the future) isn't deterministic. A non-reasoning machine and a reasoning machine could create the same output.

The reason I know LLMs don't have thoughts is because I use them many times every day, and they are very clearly pattern machines. They don't even begin to seem rational, human, or knowledgeable. It's sometimes possible to find near-verbatim sources for their outputs.

> But imagine if interaction with NPCs (…) instead could sometimes be rewarding, sometimes useless, dynamically adjusted in how you interact with the world in non-predictable ways.

That’s a slot machine, and the same mechanism which also gets us hooked on social media. Sounds like something which would immediately be exploited by vapid addiction-as-a-feature games à la FarmVille.

> The player would just waste their time in their usual approach of canvasing each new area, which would become unsustainable. There would be no reliable way of ensuring you've extracted all the content.

Sounds frustrating. Ultimately games should be rewarding and fun. Constraints are a feature.

> All he/she could do is roam around more naturally, hoping the glimpses they catch are engaging and interesting enough.

Good reminder to go take a walk outside. Take a train to somewhere we haven’t been. Pick a road we’ve never crossed. We don’t even need a mini map, and sucks that we don’t have teleportation back to base, but we do have a special device which always points the way back.

> Realistically though, how do you build an exciting player experience with this framework? (…) Whether players actually enjoy this is another thing entirely.

Agreed. Though not enjoying it and abandoning it is fine, I’m more worried about people not enjoying it but feeling unable to quit (which already happens today, but I think the proposed system would make it worse).

> Current video games are designed around streamlining content. As a player, your job is to extract all content from an area before going to the next.

Wrong right from the outset. Some games are designed around content and "extraction". Many are not.

"But that's not how real life works at all, right?"

How real life works is always a plausible interesting goal, but it's very often at odds with a bunch of other valuable goals for players.

A particular sharp example of this is sports video games. It might well be interesting (and certainly realistic) to simulate bad referees in a sports game. Horrible blown calls by tennis line judges, or missed calls by basketball refs, or bad umpire calls on pitches. Real-life soccer makes working the refs and their inability to see everything an art form, as far as I can tell.

Perhaps that's interesting, but the irony here is that real life refs are actually bad simulations of the original perfect game code in the first place, from a certain point of view. I think debates about the use of instant replay in sports gets at the heart of this, and one could imagine using real-time AI to help refs taking this conversation much further.

I think the sports case is a particularly sharp example, but it definitely holds with all sorts of choices in games.

For Animal Crossing in particular, I remember when I finally played it, it struck me after a while how much it had in common with recent MMOs (Everquest and World of Warcraft) that I had had fellow game developer friends have their lives severely disrupted by. And when I played the original Animal Crossing, I remember noticing specifically how careful the designers were in having players use up every bit of interesting content in a day after 45 minutes or an hour, so that eventually you'd run out of things to do, and that was the game's signal to put it down and pick it up again the next day. And I remember being struck by how intentional it was, and how humane it was... particularly given their goal of wanting to make a game that was asynchronously coop (where different family members could play in the same shared space at different times of day and interact asynchronously). As a game designer myself, I really respected the care they put into that.

Anyway, that's my immediate thought on seeing this (fascinating, valuable) experiment with LLM dialogue in Animal Crossing. The actual way NPCs work in these games as they are has been honed over time to serve a very specific function. It's very similar to personal testimonials by paid actors in commercials; a human expressing an idea in personal dialogue form triggers all sorts natural human attention and reception in us as audience members, and so it's a lot more sticky... but getting across the information quickly and concisely is still the primary point. Even dialogue trees in games are often not used because of their inefficiency.

I totally think that there will be fascinating innovations from the current crop of AI in games, and I'm really looking forward to seeing and trying them. I just think it's unlikely they will be drop-in replacements for a lot of the techniques that game developers have already honed for cases like informational NPC dialogue.

> a Symbol that marks the NPC

That seems a bit like deck-chairs on the Titanic. The hard part isn't icon design, the hard part is (A) ensuring a clear list exists of what the NPC is supposed to ensure the user knows and (B) determining whether those goals were received successfully.

For example, imagine a mystery/puzzle game where the NPC needs to inform the user of a clue for the next puzzle, but the LLM-layer botches it, either by generating dialogue that phrases it wrong, or by failing to fit it into the first response, so that the user must always do a few "extra" interactions anyway "just in case."

I suppose you could... Feed the output into another document of "Did this NPC answer correctly" and feed it to another LLM... but down that path lies [more] madness.

Or they could just tell you. Imagine talking to someone over and over again. They would tell u to get on with wherever you promised them.

Repeating the last line of dialogue is not just a way to indicate that there's no more dialog, it often also works as a remainder, giving you the most important kernel of information ("You should go to [place] and talk with [npc]"), in case you come some time later and forgot what you were supposed to do. You can indicate there's no more dialog in many ways, but you'd lose that secondary feature. Same thing if the NPC just keeps babbling generated drivel.

Improve, yes, fix, no. I was actually already using a model fine-tuned for Skyrim.

I didn't go into it in detail, but it isn't even that I got the NPCs to start babbling about Taylor Swift. What is was was just that they knew that she was a musician, and as such, might be at the tavern. That's very hard to remove.

It's the whole debate about carefully created vs procedurely generated. LLM created dialog with be a vapid, vacuous and sterile as starfield was, or No Mans Sky

It doesn't need to be random tidbits. You can add "life events" for the character to the prompt, and steer the responses heavily toward the character wanting to talk about those. With an LLM in the picture, you can even have the character remember past interactions with you, and expand on it different ways depending on how you interacted with them.

Instead of generating truly random dialogue, you could choose to only generate random seeds within a certain number range, so that the probability that two players seeing the same line of dialogue increases, while still having enough variety for it to feel "random" to a solo user.

> will inevitably make us lose common ground scenarios that end up being memorable moments, like the arrow to the knee from Skyrim or "such devastation! this was not my intention" from Final Fantasy 14.

GLaDOS from Portal would offer one player pudding and another one a steak. You get to a wall which says “the ravioli is a fraud” and become utterly confused.

I agree. An important aspect would be lost. It would be as interesting and relatable as sharing that dream you had last night with your friends. “Uh huh. Cool story bro.”

A better application of LLMs could be merely using them as a text parser in text adventures. NPCs could continue to have some hidden, hard coded information or abilities, here stored in the context window, and the LLM is used to provide that information to the the player he (or she) puts in roughly the right words. Rather than exactly the right words.

Simulation games are their own whole genre. Amazing stories have come out of games like Dwarf Fortress.

> A variable in a function scope or runtime malloc'd spot? No chance of finding a stable spot.

It depends, on a system with no ASLR it's potentially still deterministic, but there are a lot of potential sources of non-determinism.

At that point why not bit bang any spare GPIO ? like GPIO for 2nd player controller ?