Yeah. One of the first things I try with language models is ask them to play Zork. Tends to work ok for a couple of rooms and then falls apart hard. There just aren't any guardrails in place and so I usually end up in a room full of busty catgirls or something with an inventory that makes no sense.

This is a great point! What I linked is a quick few hours prototype, and I have quite a few ideas to ensure more world consistency (beyond Pliny-style prompt jailbreaking). I didn't have the time yet to prove they would work well, though.

Currently working on an idea like this, but its a history simulator for educational use - I find that LLMs respond rather well to being grounded in a specific time/setting in real world history, as opposed to being told to roleplay a fictional setting. The latent space of any fictional world is close enough to other fictional worlds that they will rapidly slide off into other similar-sounding settings. Whereas if you return them to a super-specific historical context each go-around ("The time is now 3:13 pm. It is August 3, 1348. You are currently simulating the functioning of a small vineyard in Normandy. The farmer, [NPC name], is looking for helpers in the fields") they will be able to pull from a pretty solid baseline of background knowledge and do a decent job with it.

Some fun things I've been experimenting with is 1) injecting primary sources from a given time and place into the LLMs contex to further ground it in "reality" and 2) asking the LLM to try to simulate the actual historical language of the era - i.e. a toggle button to switch to medieval French. Gemini flash lite, the only economical model for this sort of thing, is not great at this yet but in a year or so I think it will be a fascinating history and language learning tool.

Have been meaning to write this project up for HN but if anyone wants to try a very early version of it, it's here - you can modify the url to pick a specific year and region or just do the base url for a fully random spawn, i.e. here is Europe in 1348: https://historysimulator.vercel.app/1348/europe

I think a big part of it is not so much that they aren't capable of being a dungeon master, but they are constitutionally unfit due to their agreeability.

The biggest improvement there is to treat the game engine as the "user", and the player (and their input) is merely one among many things the game engine is managing. But then you also need a game engine that manages lots of the state programmatically, with formal transitions of that state. The LLM can manage the state transitions, but the actual state needs to be more formal.

Oh, great to hear it worked for you! I also want to try the role reversal soon.

And the pipe organ thing is a garbled version of a motif which Neal Stephenson used in several of his novels - it shows up repeatedly in Cryptonomicon, but he toyed with the idea in some of his earlier works like The Big U.

I think if you built some kind of game state server it would make a great front end for it. it could even generate the "rooms" as some kind of graph with items, and foes, and descriptions and directions between the rooms. items might need actions to transform or use items.

> but I think there's some new game genre waiting to be discovered

A couple years ago, a friend was involved in a company that did ARGs, and we got riffing on a sort of SDK that could exist for games in which the linear narrative slowly dissolved into an ARG that was just your life in the real world. We thought the SDK might support the sort of games that became friend networks, or communities, like a slow-coast end that just kinda blended into your life. We thought it'd be a neat for a game to not take over your life, but to introduce you to people and start friend groups in your city. Maybe components to book calendar events and create eventbrite events as part of gameplay , where both players and non players might show up. We thought a fun metric might be "how many friend groups would look back in 10 years and, when people asked how it started, it was all in a game that slowly became their life"

Ooh, I totally have to try that out! Very similar concept to mine, but taken further, I love it.

What I really like about your blogpost is the concept of "the promise". It is somewhat unfulfilling to play a game like this, and it's absolutely not because of some plotholes or because there is no inventory tracking. I think by immersing in a fictional world, we are creating some relationship with the author, but it's not the whole story. Erotic roleplay is a thing. Would a comedy game work? What is it that makes "synthetic fantasy" more boring than real fantasy? I need a better theory here.

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Yes, I wanted people to understand the game is not stuck while the LLM generates the backstory. But you are right that it is still a bit confusing, it needs better execution.

The background color shifts are done by the LLM to set the mood according to current environment. It's a bit random, but still a fun gimmick.

When you play Dolmenwood[1], for example, as a TTRPG setting and group of modules, no table will play the same game, but they are all playing Dolmenwood. So I guess it would depend on how much you can get the LLM to adhere to your setting and rules.

[1] https://www.exaltedfuneral.com/pages/dolmenwood Yes I'm plugging this, but I am not financially involved.

One part that's kind of boring when playing a text adventure is trying things the original authors did not anticipate and getting a boring standard response. LLMs could make this part more interesting by adding more playful, hopefully even witty responses. If you're playing in the browser, this could even be using the Prompt API utilizing a small LLM that's running locally!

Also you could use LLMs for NPCs and for certain areas of the game, like mazes.

I'm sure there are way more possibilities. We're still at the very beginning. Just think about it: Everyone is complaining about LLMs hallucinating. Text adventures are an area where such hallucinations are desired.

You can have it create and reuse permanent world info as players explore it.

Thanks, I will have a look

It's a text adventure by anything but the most hidebound traditionalist definition. The text is where all of the real action takes place; the graphics are more an illustration of that text than the reality of the game.

That’s… kinda a good point I suppose, I see the comparison.

I am actually in the process of writing one in Lua to amuse my child! He's not yet a very strong reader nor typist, so to begin with the story will progress just by moving around, similar to Inside the Facility[1]. This is also to help keep the parser simple – I don't really want to write a parser, but I do need to implement the basics to get an engine in my child's native language.

[1]: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=stsdri5zh7a4i5my

Very cool!

Yeah, LLMs would need to be wildly constrained to a world model. I remember in some LLM text game that was supposed to be medieval dungeon crawl, I just declared that I pulled a shotgun from my bag and blasted the goblins, and it just rolled with it instead of saying 'no.'

> what the author chooses to leave unimplemented or generic is actually an important signal to the player.

For computer games, yes, because you can get stuck with no apparent way out. As an aid for TTRPGs where a human GM is present and can steer the PCs out of blind alleys, it could make a very nice aid to world building. “Give me fifty random characters with backstory for a Pathfinder 2e game” is exactly the sort of thing we should use AI for. It doesn’t really matter. It’s flavor. So if the AI messes up… who cares?

LLMs are absolutely fantastic for text adventures. You are straw manning by assuming the idea is to just feed some world description into the context and then chat with the model.