Adventuring with AI
AI Dungeon is a remarkable update to an obsolete genre
You are a wizard living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a staff and a spellbook. You finish your long journey and finally arrive at the ruin you’ve been looking for.
You have come here searching for a mystical spellbook of great power called the Book of Essence. You look around and see it on a table to the far side of the room.
> You take the book.
Your heart beats and you feel your palms become sweaty. You look at the book again and put your hand on it when you hear a noise in the distance.
> You listen.
You listen and hear only the sound of silence. Then you see something dark move in the rubble behind you. You turn around and see that it is a figure of a man brandishing a blade.
> You say “Stay back!”
The figure doesn’t answer and attacks. You cast a spell and hit him with a bolt of lightning. He falls to the ground, but doesn’t stay that way for long.
If you think this reads like the opening lines of a 1970's adventure game, you could be forgiven. This is not the product of a bygone relic, however, but a wonder of modern technology. Welcome to the AI Dungeon.
Text-Based Adventures
Text adventures originated in the 1970s, pioneered by William Crowther and Don Woods. Their game, Adventure, was inspired by Crowther’s experience as a caver. Players navigate a cave system using simple commands such as: GO NORTH, ENTER CAVE or GET LAMP.
It was an instant success.
According to MIT alumnus Dave Lebling, Adventure killed productivity at the Laboratory of Computer Science for a full week.
Adventure sparked the creation of an entire genre. Games like Zork and Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) cemented the text adventure genre’s place in popular culture.
Welcome to the Dungeon
> You say “Stay down! For your own good!”
He rises to his feet again and backs away from you. You back off and wait for him to attack, but he doesn’t. Instead he just stares at you for a moment and then disappears into the darkness.
Skip ahead four decades.
Text adventures have mostly disappeared. Their spirit lives on in modern interactive fiction, but outside of game jams and a few indie releases, the text-based adventure is dead.
Enter AI Dungeon. A fully text-based experience hoping to use artificial intelligence to revive the genre.
AI Dungeon uses a technique called neural natural language processing to interpret player inputs and generate responses. This means that any sentence expressed in English can be used as an input.
In its most basic form, a game of AI Dungeon begins with you choosing a genre and a class for your character. For example, you might choose to play a wizard in a fantasy story; a courier in the post-apocalypse; or a cop in a cyberpunk dystopia.
Based on your choices, the AI will generate a prompt and the story begins. You can choose to describe an action, speech, or even narrate part of the story yourself. In this fashion, you and the AI collaborate to build a story.
A Playmate Not a Game
> You chase him.
You run after him and that’s when you see a number of Dark Elves surrounding him. They are extremely muscular, have sharp features and black skin.
Despite the superficial resemblance to the adventure games of old, it doesn’t feel like an old text adventure. Part of the joy of Adventure and Zork is the satisfaction of typing a command that the computer understands and slowly progressing through the puzzle. AI Dungeon is forced to answer no matter the input. Although this removes the frustration of being misunderstood, it also removes the entire reward system.
AI Dungeon tries to alleviate this problem by giving you objectives. Unfortunately, the AI is a bit too random. Too meandering. In this fashion, one frustration is traded for another.
That’s not to say that AI Dungeon isn’t great fun though!
It is not about solving a finely crafted puzzle. Rather, it is a prompt for one’s own imagination. AI Dungeon feels more like a playmate than a game.
It invokes memories of playing with my niece and nephew. Telling stories where plot points are wild, and characters are fleeting. But how can that be a criticism? It’s frankly astonishing.
Alan Turing devised a famous thought experiment to test for artificial intelligence. If under a controlled set of conditions, a computer’s performance is indistinguishable from a human, it can be considered truly intelligent. AI Dungeon fails the test, of course. But it is a valiant effort.
In ten years, my niblings will be old enough to tell stories that are both complex and consistent. Where will AI be by then?
That certainly will be an adventure.
Hopefully, better fated than mine…
> You say “I want to interview you for an article I am writing about artificial intelligence!”
He looks at you like you’re crazy and then attacks. The Dark Elves stand around you and watch as you get hacked apart.
