In contrast to runtime stuff (like an AI dungeon master) I've long wished for authoring tools to help people create rich game-worlds and quest interactions. On reflection, that's something I wouldn't expect LLMs to deliver either: It relies heavily on modeling cause-and-effect, with choices which are blocked or enabled by other choices.

I'm talking about stuff that could throw up a warning like: "Warning: Broken quest steps in For The Want of a Nail. Invariant Character:Blacksmith may have been killed by 5 other paths."

I wonder if models trained on the real world will unintentionally destroy the game experience for people. In (NPC structured) video games things always work out ideally, you invest and you get a return. Any risk is illustrated for the user.

With LLM training, the NPC might take a more realistic approach and inform you that 4 of 6 the beetle nuts you collected for them are cracked and useless, and next time you should be more careful packing them in your backpack.

> authoring tools to help people create rich game-worlds and quest interactions

I built one of those things. It used random generation from datasets to create everything from gods and their pantheons to their followers, cities, and the cultures that make up the cities.

None of it used LLMs and it created better content than any model could, but it was hard to debug and harder still to figure out "What even is a culture?"

That's a more interesting usecase. But what you're describing is just an IDE, there's nothing AI about that.

There's a bigger (but related) problem than text quality:

With a usual game environment, the devs create a whitelist of actions the player is allowed to perform. If there's no combat, they simply don't give the player the option to perform violent actions. If they don't want the player to vault barriers they just don't include a jump button. Vehicles and buildings are props by default and only become intractable because the devs consciously chose to make them so. Devs have generally gotten very good at implying what's out of scope, so players generally don't even attempt actions that are intended to be impossible.

In LLM world with free-text entry, controlling what's on-theme becomes a blacklist rather than a whitelist, as the player can choose to input anything. Including things for flavour or lore reasons now becomes more difficult, as a whitelist is finite, while the blacklist of undesired actions is practically infinite.

I don't quite buy that contrast. I agree as long as we are talking story. The developers will have a very difficult time trying to control what some character is like, and if that matters for the gameplay it's a big problem. On the gameplay front the available actions will always be a whitelist, because somebody has to implement them. It's essentially the same problem the crypto kids had with their "cross game non-fungible items", where they just assumed that items would somehow be portable. Just because you can get some NPC to tell you about a dragon in the nearby cave doesn't make that cave actually appear. You're never going to get to fight a darksouls boss in forza horizon. The game might tell you that you get to, that doesn't make it true.

That's still a problem though, right?

If the NPCs are writing cheques that the engine can't cash, the player won't necessarily be able to trust any NPC dialogue.

Yes. You won't be able to trust what they say in relation to the story, not to the actuality of the gameplay. They're dialogue with essentially be orthogonal to play. Talk about ludo-narrative dissonance.