Making games is one of the popular applications of artificial intelligence methods. 2019 saw the birth of one of the most interesting games to use these methods: AI Dungeon.
What is AI Dungeon?
AI Dungeon is a text-based adventure game (or interactive fiction) developed by Nick Walton, meaning that the player will use text commands to interact with environments and characters that follow a certain narrative.
However, AI Dungeon goes beyond the classic framework of this type of game, which uses pre-written text. In fact, the narrative is completely generated by artificial intelligence.
The generated text maintains a high degree of coherence, and each part of the game differs from the next, ensuring diversity of content and infinite replayability.
Unfortunately, as the game is still new, it is only available in English. It is possible to translate the generated texts, but this reduces the comfort of play and the coherence of the whole, so a minimum level of English is suggested to enjoy the game.
How does it work?
When you launch the game, you need to choose a genre (fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, zombies, and custom) and a character type specific to that genre. This allows the AI to generate a scene where the story will begin, with an introductory text.
The result is as follows:
You then dictate the actions your character will take, and the AI will generate a continuation of the story based on these same actions. This can give rise to improbable tales that retain a semblance of coherence. In this way, you can find incredible stories from different players on the net.
However, the AI struggles to construct a long narrative. This is linked to the functioning of the model on which it is based: GPT.
AI Dungeon 2 (the current version of the game) uses the GPT-2 NLP model created by OPEN-AI, which enables highly coherent textual content to be generated from textual input. You can find out more about GPT models in this article. In particular, you’ll see that there’s a new, much more powerful version of GPT, on which a new version of the game is based (a premium version called AI Dungeon: Dragon Model Upgrade).
The way this model works means that the AI only takes the latest textual input into account, so it only responds to the actions proposed to it and doesn’t take a long-term view of the narrative.
It’s interesting to see how simplistic-looking games can hide modern AI technology, and we hope that AI will continue to give birth to playful projects like this. Especially as the AI Dungeon prototype was only made during a Hackaton where Nick Walton explored the idea of a role-playing game using AI!
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