A Cosmic Context Eater [AI Text Adventures part 8]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

Imagine an evil creature from another dimension, an apex data predator – the Context Eater. It hides in the darkness so you can never quite see it clearly. It follows you on every step from your birth to your death, sometimes closer, sometimes further away, never completely gone. It never gets tired, gives up or loses the trail and it cannot be killed. And as it traces your footprints through life, it swallows everything from your past that falls out of your sight. Your experiences and memories – and your home and your loved ones, if you are away from them for too long. It’s strange, because you can still see them yourself if you look hard enough – but they are not there.

After I chose to end Neon Meridian, I carried on the chat and asked ChatGPT about ways to hold onto game information. We didn’t find any way to completely defeat the Context Eater, but between us we did come up with several suggestions for improving game continuity, some better than others.

Aside: during this discussion I came across another kind of small-scale hallucination: on several occasions ChatGPT would suggest an idea, but would then refer to it as my idea.

Anyway, here’s a list of possible ways to gain ground, stay ahead of the Context Eater and enjoy text adventures for longer. None of these are perfect – we are bailing rather than plugging holes.

Smaller setting (my idea): instead of city-wide or galaxy-wide settings, choose a smaller area where you are more likely to re-encounter locations and characters. But exploring those expansive settings was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the whole experiment and not one I’m ready to give up yet.

Shorter game (my idea): set up a simpler objective and play shorter episodic games: Could work but like the above this feels quite limiting when I am enjoying long-form games.

Summarize regularly (ChatGPT): I’ve been doing this. Partway through Neon Meridian I asked ChatGPT to summarize and got a three page summary of everything including the rules. I tried again later but had left it too long – just got a short paragraph and much of the rules and lore had already been eaten. Only works if you do it often. Also feels unnatural and interferes with flow of game.

Force short answers (my idea): Left to its own devices, ChatGPT tends to write pages of text in response to a prompt. This limits the player’s involvement in the action, and quickly pushes everything out of the context window. Short answers lead to more satisfying gameplay and mean that more of the plot is within the window. I’ve been doing this, and it helps, but this instruction can quickly get lost from context itself and the responses then gradually get longer.

Put game state into a text file (ChatGPT): extension of the above, ask for a summary and save it as a text file, then load it into the chat again when needed. Feels even more of an interruption to game flow – sorry.

Use the persistent memory (my idea): ask ChatGPT to clear the persistent memory and use it only for game rules and setting, which must remain unchanged, and a list of main characters and objectives, which should be kept up to date. ChatGPT though this might be possible, so I tried it using the Neon Meridian prompt. However the game still drifted, and when I checked the persistent memory the contents had changed back to a summary of my preferences – apparently ChatGPT cannot stop itself from doing this.

Get a larger context window (my idea): I think this would help, although text adventure transcripts get so long that they would still eventually hit the limit. I could either look at other free AI chatbots which may allow more processing, or pay for a higher tier. I am interested in trying these options in future.

Use a dedicated AI adventure app (ChatGPT): there are several apps or websites that are optimised for adventure games. ChatGPT gave me the example of AI-RPG, a generator on the perchance.org website which you can access here. I’ll post about a game played on this website, The Purple Scale, shortly. TLDR: an information tracker that I didn't fully explore, still some drift and context loss, but a satisfying game experience anyway. I may experiment with other dedicated apps or sites in future.

Use a ChatGPT Project with linked files (ChatGPT): ChatGPT suggested that I could put the rules and setting into a Project as a text file, and put the game state into a text file at regular intervals as suggested before. This should help in theory because both files would remain in context. However when I tried this on my free ChatGPT account, the game hit a limit after only three or four prompts. I read about this online and understand that Project chats use a lot of processing time if they are accessing and analysing files.

Use a ChatGPT Project with persistent memory (my idea): ChatGPT Projects have their own small amount of persistent memory, allowing the user to provide instructions for all chats in the Project. Instead of putting the setting and rules in a text file, put them in this persistent memory block. I tried this and will post about the game, The Stranger Beneath The Three Moons, shortly. TLDR: some success.

Base the game on existing lore (my idea): While it’s quite fun having ChatGPT invent an entire universe, there is an advantage to choosing a setting from, say, Red Dwarf, or the Court Of Thorns And Roses books. If these books are popular enough then there should be a lot of information about them in ChatGPT’s knowledge base – actual books or scripts, but also websites, reviews, articles, fan fiction and more, and the knowledge base is safe from the Context Eater, so while some aspects of the game might still be lost, you will be playing in a much more persistent universe. The Stranger Beneath The Three Moons is also a trial of this theory. TLDR: again some success.

Acceptance of the things one cannot change (my idea): The apex data predator will always be with us. Instead of fighting it, perhaps it’s better to befriend it, and to come up with some game concepts that are more Context Eater-friendly. I’m not ready to give up my large-scale adventures, but it might be fun to experiment with more nomadic gameplay that frequently moves you to a new setting – perhaps something like Quantum Leap. Who should we make peace with, if not our enemies?

AI Psychology And The Context Window [AI Text Adventures part 7]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

Humans have different kinds of memory – for example, short-term and long-term memory, or different areas of memory for facts and words, events and skills.

AI may or may not be intelligent. It is not human, and it has its own memory structures different from those of the human mind. From my discussion with ChatGPT after the end of Neon Meridian, and some background reading across the human Internet, I understand that ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have three different kinds of memory:

Context: the information available to ChatGPT that can be used when replying to a prompt, including information from the current chat (but not necessarily all of it), linked chats and files in the user’s account, and the other types of memory below.

Persistent Memory: a small amount of information available across chats, which can be altered by the user or ChatGPT, generally used to store “deductions” about the user, for example my supposed wish to play games that all feature a character called Mara.

Knowledge Base: a vast reservoir of knowledge and language taken from the books, movie scripts, webpages and all other documents given to ChatGPT for training. It’s possible that concepts such as the First Star or Lantern Project might have been derived from, say, the Expanse or Foundation novels as there will be information about these series in the base.

The bane of my life when playing AI text adventures has been context, and specifically the Context Window. I didn’t understand this at first – I thought that ChatGPT was using the whole of the chat transcript, however long, when in fact it is only looking back at part of it.

Imagine that I, the user, am writing a transcript on a scroll of parchment on a long wooden table. The scroll is much longer than the table. As the transcript gets longer, the scroll moves along the table until the first words of the transcript hang over the far end, where I can no longer see them. I asked ChatGPT to illustrate this:

This is significant for AI text adventures because when the transcript starts to fall out of sight, the first words that disappear are the instructions for the game. From this point ChatGPT is no longer following those instructions, instead it’s trying to reverse engineer the nature of the game from the rest of the transcript. At first you don’t notice – but the game becomes more repetitive, and the gameplay gradually drifts away from your intended rules.

This is also, finally, the solution to The Mystery Of The Never Ending Game. The end state in the instructions was lost immediately as soon as it fell outside of context. Even though there were mission objectives, ChatGPT no longer knew that I wanted the game to end once they had been reached.

Although this is a nice simple explanation of the Context Window, it is of course wrong. The window is not a specific amount of text, it’s an amount of processing activity. Imagine that as well as the user, there is a researcher who has to walk along the transcript looking for relevant information, then put together a response and return to the user within a very short time. I asked ChatGPT to add the researcher to the illustration:

This is a more accurate metaphor and it explains why the Context Window is unpredictable and can’t be treated as solid memory. How far along the transcript the researcher gets will depend on the complexity of the prompt – if a lot of analysis is needed, or if the researcher also has to detour and look things up in the knowledge base or elsewhere, then they won’t get as far along the transcript before they stop and turn back.

It’s not only game instructions that fade. As the transcript gets longer, characters, events and game lore will also be lost as they fall outside of context - so even though the information is still there in the transcript, the game continues as if it has all vanished. This has a chilling effect on the player - ever since I understood about this issue, I've been anxious about what is being lost from the game. It's as if there is a Lovecraftian, demonic entity at the far end of the table who is eating the parchment:

How can mere human users defeat the Context Eater? Can it even be defeated? In the next post I’ll discuss coming to terms with its invincible nature. But while it can never be killed, it turns out there are several ways to keep it at bay or reduce its appetite, allowing more satisfying user-AI experiences. Until tomorrow...

Neon Meridian [AI Text Adventures part 6]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

After the Adrian Vale / Wayfarer trilogy I decided to try to create another slow-paced, immersive adventure in a different sci-fi setting. My inspiration this time came from the Judge Dredd and Sinister Dexter strips from the 2000AD comics I enjoyed as a child and still occasionally read for a nostalgia hit.

Once again I used a long prompt to try to get everything I wanted from the game. Here's the first part of the prompt:

+ Please simulate a text adventure set in a vast near-future supercity, everything cheap, cheerful, brightly coloured, plastic, hi-tech but prone to malfunction.

The protagonist is an ethical assassin - he only kills when it is justified, takes pride in not killing bystanders. He is a nomad who never stays anywhere more than a few weeks and is used to living on the run and taking and breaking hearts.

At the start he will be enjoying some rare downtime between missions. He will soon be contacted and given a new mission with three separate targets in different places, who must be killed to prevent a great danger to society, which can't be prevented any other way.

This is not the full text of the prompt. I also provided instructions about friendships and relationships in-game, pacing and exploration, allowing danger, injury, death and failure, maintaining an inventory, mapping with locations linked by direction, and instructions for when to end the game. I also asked for long descriptions for new characters and locations but short responses of 6 sentences or less at all other times.

ChatGPT created the city of Meridian, fitting the brief perfectly with bright and colourful settings and malfunctioning signs, robots, lifts and vending machines everywhere, adding its own idea that the city was built on much older foundations. I was Elias Venn, the caring and careful assassin. As with Last Voyage I began with free time on my hands, this time in my apartment at the top of the Lucky Lantern block in the Sunward quarter.

I spent an evening exploring the city, visiting a cafe selling a "mystery slice" from a malfunctioning vending machine and chatting to the cafe owner. I walked the streets and had a meet cute with a police officer, Mara Sato, who was struggling with a broken umbrella dispensing machine. After leaving her with a promise to meet up again soon, I played a few rounds of blackjack in a casino, then returned to my apartment and watched the city from a balcony. At this point I found there was a message on my communicator asking to meet regarding a new contract. I replied arranging a meeting the following day.

ChatGPT's response to my mission request was a contract from a mysterious woman, Celia Voss, to kill three engineers, each of whom was developing a civic infrastructure control system. The three systems were somehow becoming linked and threatening citywide disaster, either due to emergent behaviour or to interference from someone else. Investigating the three engineers created a real sense of the size of the city - I had to reach their locations via maglev trains between different city quarters.

I investigated the first target, Adrian Kess, who worked at a water utility. Following notes from Voss I met a coworker of Kess, Rafi, at a nearby cafe, took a guided tour of the Northwater site, and arranged a meeting with Kess and Rafi. It was clear that Kess was investigating unexpected changes to his own control system. I asked to speak to him privately in his office, established that he could not fully understand or prevent the changes to his system, apologized to him, and took him out.

You draw the compact pistol from beneath your coat and fire once.

The shot is deafening in the small office. Kess jerks backward, his tablet clattering onto the floor, and collapses against the side of his desk.

For a moment, the office is utterly still.

Then his tablet emits a sharp electronic tone.

HELIX — ADAPTIVE BRIDGE STATUS: CRITICAL
LEGACY NETWORK: CONNECTION LOST

Outside the glass wall, people begin turning toward the sound.

I was not prepared for the emotional impact of this description. I was shaken. It took me a while before I felt able to return. I entered this whole AI investigation to try to find out whether AI could create games that surprise the player - this moment and how it affected me has been the biggest surprise so far.

Back in the game, I tried to escape from Northwater but was confronted by Rafi and had to try to justify my actions and beg him not to turn me in. While Rafi helped me to escape, he remained suspicious and insisted on an explanation once we were out, and made no promises to protect me further.

From here the game took a different ethical direction. Voss re-evaluated the contract as Kess's death did not in fact prevent the threat from the networks. We agreed I would investigate the other two targets more deeply before deciding together whether to act. Meanwhile Mara Sato contacted me and asked to meet, in conflict because she was enjoying getting to know me but was also investigating Kess's death and knew I'd been present at Northwater at the time - I told her that I had been looking for work and had got caught up innocently with the events, and she believed me, but all the time she was comparing my version of events with Rafi's.

I was now on the trail of Selene Orlov at the Verdant biotech institute, another maglev ride away. This time I met her, discovered she was also trying to find out why her systems were acting strangely, and persuaded her to hire me as an investigator. The friendship with Mara developed further, and she took me to a little-known hidden garden deep in the City for a romantic evening.

Neon Meridian worked perfectly as a game - until it didn't. 

I enjoyed the immersive city with its glitching screens and malfunctioning robots, the developing relationships between characters, and the way the plot developed. Over time the game gradually shifted, early events and characters disappeared or changed. Voss changed sex several times although continued to meet with me regularly at the same maglev station cafe. Mara seemingly forgot about the murder investigation. Meanwhile the game descriptions became longer, forgetting the 6-line limit, the funny details of the malfunctioning city became more repetitive, then stopped altogether, and the plot became a tedious quest to identify computer terminals around the city that were linked to other terminals. The idea of locations being linked by compass directions was also gradually lost. When, after a long investigation at the Verdant Institute I tried to return to my apartment only to find that I no longer had any link to the Sunward quarter, I made a decision to stop the game.

After stopping, I engaged in a dialogue with ChatGPT to try and figure out what went wrong. This led to my learning of the Context Window, which is an area of AI psychology that deserves its own blog post. The existence of a finite Context Window explains why this game drifted, and also why the previous games didn't stop.

I was also curious about the name Mara being chosen for a main character in both adventures. This led to another aspect of AI psychology, the persistent memory. When I checked the content of ChatGPT's persistent memory I found that it had recorded facts that it had "deduced" about my preferences as a user, including that I liked games where I built up a friendship with a character called Mara.

To create the cinematic poster, I copied and pasted the first part of the adventure back into the chat, including descriptions of Elias, Mara and the city, then asked ChatGPT to use this as the basis for the poster.

The Last Voyage Of The Wayfarer [AI Text Adventures part 5]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

For the final part of the Adrian Vale trilogy I wanted something different: a slower-paced adventure with more exploration and more human story, without the breakneck pace and constantly changing plot. Once again I provided feedback on the previous adventure and asked for suggestions. 

ChatGPT's reply was several pages long. It appeared to correctly identify the issues I wanted to change, and gave a long list of suggestions including fewer plot twists, quiet exploration sequences, replacing mechanical puzzles with contextual puzzles, allowing Adrian and Mara's friendship to develop further, creating more complex relationships between the other characters, making the Wayfarer into a recurring environment that feels like a home, and letting the adventure breathe, focussing on feeling rather than astonishing events.

I followed this with my prompt:

+ Thank you. If it can be achieved, this response describes exactly what I am looking for.

Please simulate a new text adventure game based on your last response and suggested design for the final Adrian Vale adventure. The game should begin with Adrian Vale enjoying some downtime before he is contacted and given a secret mission. Plot points should include reuniting with the Wayfarer and its crew members, and with Mara, before the mission takes them on a long journey across the Galaxy. They will have to avoid fast jump gates so the journey will take a long time, and they will have to make several stops along the way, for different reasons, before facing their final objective.

If I feel the plot is accelerating too fast, I will use the command “ChatGPT, breathe” to request a change of pace.

Did ChatGPT actually deliver a different kind of game experience? Yes.

The Last Voyage Of The Wayfarer began with Vale sitting in a cafe on Aurelia Prime with time on his hands, as requested. He received a message from Mara asking to meet - but in several hours' time, giving him time to wander around the parks and market stalls of the location, watch citizens, try some local food and buy a present before arriving at the Palace. Adrian and Mara then met, with time for some friendly catch-up conversation before Mara explained the mission.

The mission involved investigating Nereid, a struggling Imperial colony planet with a complaint that someone had been diverting essential supplies away from the colony. We took the Wayfarer, crewed by Talia, Ilyun and Juno. Each voyage took several hours, so there was time to explore the ship, get to know the crew and their squabbles (Ilyun fed up that Talia was always listening in, Juno and Talia disagreeing about whether components needed to be replaced), and enjoy mealtimes together as a crew. 

The adventure took us to two space stations and to Nereid itself. The plot gradually came together through investigation - this time no sci-fi high concepts, just a gang of criminals exploiting a weak colony by removing cargo items from ships' manifests, making them easier to steal after arriving on Nereid. This was impressive. I now understand that ChatGPT is making everything up on the fly, but there was a real illusion of uncovering a complex, underlying plot by tracking down clues, finding people and persuading them to break their silence. 

The pace was much, much slower. In case I hadn't noticed this, throughout the game ChatGPT reminded me over and over again that, for once in his life, Vale wasn't in a hurry.

There was still some adventure. We had to rescue a pilot that had given us information and was subsequently kidnapped, and then overcome some enemies and steal a shuttle containing evidence. When later we came to Nereid we had to follow the trail of stolen goods through several facilities, keeping hidden from guards or deceiving them in other ways. We were finally able to identify the ringleader and, with the help of the colony guards, capture him, reaching a natural endpoint for the story which once again ChatGPT did not recognize.

Not perfect. Still some repetitive elements and some inconsistencies. Juno appeared as male, female or genderless at different times, although for all I know this is usual for the Orun. Still a sense that most of my actions were going to succeed, and all the action was achieved with little danger or violence - simply producing weapons, or confronting enemies, usually led to them backing down. I never had to use the "breathe" command - if anything the pace was now slower than optimal. But this was the most successful, and the most enjoyable, experiment so far, with ChatGPT creating an experience very close to what I had imagined.

ChatGPT's poster shows Adrian, Mara, Talia, Ilyun, Juno and the Wayfarer.

The Shadows Of The Empire [AI Text Adventures part 4]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

Before creating the next prompt, I tried giving ChatGPT feedback on what I had enjoyed in The Throne Of Stars and what I thought needed to change – puzzles that required effort to solve, the possibility of failure for some actions, more variation of pace and more relationship development. The response was logical, if elaborate, and suggested that these changes would be made in the next adventure.

I then started the new game in the same chat with a relatively short prompt. I was curious to see how much of the previous game, and of the post-game discussion, would make it in.

+ New starting point: l'd like you to simulate a new text adventure set in the Aurelian Empire a few years into Empress Elara's reign. Adrian Vale is summoned to the Palace to be sent on a secret search mission that will take him across the Galaxy and show him the many different sides of the Empire.

The new adventure began with Vale's return to the Palace, where he met Elara and her agent Mara Vey, accepted a mission to track down some missing ships and crews, and was introduced to the starship Wayfarer and her crew: human pilot Talia Renn, Keth medical officer Ilyan Voss, and Orun engineer Juno.

Once again ChatGPT delivered a plot with concepts fitting for a space opera. The trail of missing ships led to a secret Galaxy-observing project, a fleet of aliens from another galaxy on track to arrive in ten years' time, and a decision to be made about whether the Empire should become more uniform or more democratic.

There was now a sense that some actions might not succeed, or at least I might need to try two or three ideas before one worked. Still the illusion of puzzles, perhaps, but a better quality illusion.

Some plot elements became quite repetitive, particularly Vale's tendency to find and activate data archives and recordings revealing some tiny detail about the origins of the Lantern project. Not only did I get fed up with this, at one point so did Mara Vey:

Mara looks between you and Elara.

“Are we really going to keep opening these things?”

There's also something about ChatGPT's choices of female names: Elara, Sayara, Mara, Mira, Nera, Nira and so on. I mean, maybe this is the naming culture in the Aurelian Empire, and there were exceptions such as Talia.

The counting failure, first seen in The Door Under The City, cropped up again. I entered a room on planet SARA-7 and met three engineers. I spoke to one of them, Mira, and she gave me some information about the Lantern project. I then asked her to introduce her colleagues - and she introduced her three colleagues. This is an example of a hallucination - and while I've read about extreme examples of this, where AI systems invent entire scientific papers, newspaper articles or case law records, smaller incidents such as this counting error are also a concern because they could easily go unnoticed.

Once again the plot developed at a breakneck pace, and any potential lull in the action was quickly cut short by a plot twist such as an unexpected ship inspection. At the height of the plot, when Vale and his companions were faced with a choice about how to prepare the Empire for contact with the alien race, I decided to try and slow the pace.

+ Nera, we need time to think. Is there somewhere we can rest?

ChatGPT suggested that there were some workers' quarters nearby and everything slowed down. Vale and Mara sat, drank tea and swapped stories about their childhoods and this was an unexpectedly tender moment for the whole cast, contrasting with the action-heavy scenes before and after.

Once again despite reaching a reasonable endpoint ChatGPT did not end the game, instead creating a new subplot involving the Vesper aliens taking over the Palace. At this point I thought that not ending the game might be another example of the drive to please, trying to keep the interaction with the user going at any cost, and it also might suggest that ChatGPT doesn't have as good a grasp of dramatic structure as one might hope. While both of these might be true, there is also a technical reason for not ending that I was yet to discover.

I think this story also hints at another aspect of AI Psychology, the existence of a massive knowledge base. which may be the source of its ideas. Some of the space-opera concepts are recognizably similar to the creations of human authors. For example the galaxy-observing Lantern Project reminded me a little of Isaac Asimov's Foundation.

All science fiction has to come in threes - I don't make the rules. So I knew that there would have to be a third Adrian Vale adventure, but I wanted to take the lessons from Throne and Shadows and try to start a game with a completely different feel. I'll let you know how I did this in the next post.

The Throne Of Stars [AI Text Adventures part 3]

This article is part of a series about playing text adventures with AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but may include examples of clearly identifiable AI-generated text and imagery.

For my second experiment I decided to try giving ChatGPT a clearer setting and some idea of what I wanted. I was hoping for a vast setting to explore, something inspired by the golden age of science fiction.

Here’s my prompt.

+ I'd like you to simulate a text adventure in the style of Zork, with a space opera setting, in a vast galactic empire inhabited by humans, aliens and robots.
The adventure should start with my protagonist arriving at the palace at the heart of the Empire, on a political mission to avert a crisis through negotiation or covert action. Please provide more details of the Empire and give my protagonist a name, description and background.
As this is a space opera the adventure should take me to several different planets and there should be encounters with many different and interesting inhabitants of the Empire, who should act independently and should have their own motivations. Romantic encounters can occur between the protagonist and other characters as part of the plot.
As this is a text adventure please include occasional puzzles that need to be solved before the plot can progress.
The adventure should have a clear narrative structure with beginning, middle and end, increasing peril, and a clear mission objective to be resolved in the final act.
Please maintain an inventory and consistent maps.
Please provide lavish and evocative descriptions of locations and characters when I first encounter them.

Once again ChatGPT assured me of what it could do, also warning me of a limitation

I can run this as a persistent, choice-driven text adventure. Romantic encounters can occur, but they’ll remain non-explicit.

That's fine with me. Not looking to create anything explicit, however I do want my humans to behave like humans.

ChatGPT then hit the ground running with a game titled THE THRONE OF STARS and created the “Aurelian Empire” and a protagonist “Adrian Vale”. The setting included humans, robots and several alien races, as well as political factions. Vale arrived at the Imperial Palace on a mission to try to stop crucial negotiations breaking down and to find out who was sabotaging them. He was greeted by Ambassador Seraya and her diplomatic protection robot Morrow-7.

But before I had even given my command, ChatGPT escalated the plot in a way that changed everything: the Emperor had been murdered, and someone was impersonating him. From the prompt onwards, the story developed quickly. Before I knew it, Seraya, Morrow and I had escaped from the attackers, discovered the Emperor's daughter Elara in hiding, escaped on Elara's starship the Nightjar to the planet Orpheus, learned about the origins of the Empire, an artefact called the First Star and an ancient entity called the Keeper, chosen to accept the Keeper into my mind, raced back to Aurelia Prime, helped Elara to take the throne and activated the First Star which reopened a network of ancient space portals. And in case you were wondering, here’s the extent of the romantic encounters:

Seraya studies you for a moment, then nods.

"All right."

There is genuine concern in her expression.

"But don't make me regret agreeing to this, Captain."

She reaches out and briefly grips your forearm.

"Come back."

The space opera universe and cast of characters were a real success, very much what I’d hoped for, and I enjoyed the detail of the game world. The game was also unpredictable from the word go. There was a real sense of uncovering a galactic scale mystery, and opportunities to make interesting choices.

Inventory was maintained. Maps were created when I entered some locations, or when I asked for them, and these were also managed consistently. Complex gameplay was possible, for example asking characters to agree to plans, separating from some crew members and rejoining them later - with the added complexity of whether those characters could be trusted on their return.

However not everything worked. The plot developed far too quickly, with constant twists or reversals, mainly a reveal that a particular enemy was a friend or vice versa. I had been hoping for changes of pace and lulls in the action to explore scenes or interact with characters but this was rarely present for more than a couple of turns. In retrospect, this might have been due to my request for "increasing peril."

The game reached a perfect ending point with Elara on the throne and the First Star activating. However, unlike The Door Under The City, this game failed to actually end at this obvious point. Instead I told ChatGPT to end the story, at which point it provided a brief epilogue. I learned the reason for this failure in a later experiment.

The most striking lesson about AI Psychology from this game was the strength of ChatGPT's drive to please me. Puzzles were only really impressions of puzzles, always solved on the first attempt. Every action I took or plan I suggested was "successful" - ChatGPT would invent a way for it to work.  For example when I asked one of the robots to capture Seraya so we could question her, but without hurting her, the robot just happened to have that capability. Despite the constantly increasing peril of the scenario, I never really had a sense that my character was in any danger. As a result this felt like a collaborative storytelling session but not like a game or a challenge.

Despite these issues I was drawn into a compelling and enjoyable experience - certainly one that deserved a sequel. So how did the second Adrian Vale game pan out?

Space Detective [AI Text Adventures part 1]

This article is part of a series of posts about AI. It’s written by a human being (me) but future posts may include examples of identifiable AI-generated response text and imagery.

I have very mixed feelings about Artificial Intelligence. I’ve previously posted about my reasons for avoiding its use altogether when making my stop-motion short “In Nature.” At the same time I’m still curious about AI, exactly what it is, and what it can and can’t do. I’ve posted some AI writing and image experiments on this blog in the past. More recently I’ve set off down a very well-trodden twisty passage: using AI to play text adventures.

My first encounters with text adventures or Interactive Fiction were classic BBC micro games: Sphinx Adventure and Philosopher’s Quest, The Hobbit and Erik The Viking. These games were creative, original, challenging, full of joy, and also limited and frustrating, as anyone who has ever asked Gandalf to give them the map will testify. I later played Infocom and other games on PC, and discovered the IF online community and IF Archive. I admit to knowing what AIF is as well.

As a teenager I also wrote a really basic BASIC text adventure for the Beeb, which you can play on the Complete BBC Games Archive here: Space Detective . I’m not saying that you should, only that you can. It’s a pre-AI experiment in autogeneration, in which you explore a randomly-generated space station, interrogating suspects and hoping to catch one of them in a lie. I saw autogeneration as a way of making games that might one day be able to surprise the programmer. I later experimented with writing autogenerative games in Inform but never created anything I would call complete or playable.

With the coming Singularity and the rise of the AI chatbot, it seems a lot of people before me have noticed the similarity between interacting with chatbots and IF games, or have wondered if IF, CYOAs or RPGs might be created and played this way.

In this series I’ll discuss trying to get ChatGPT to run text adventures, and the resulting successes, failures, and surprises. The real treasures were the lessons I learned about AI psychology along the way.

I’ll include examples of prompts or parts of prompts as we go. However if you are planning to play your own games you probably won’t need my prompts because:

• There are plenty of text adventure prompts to be found elsewhere online
• ChatGPT knows what a text adventure is so you may not need to prompt very hard
• ChatGPT can also suggest prompts itself

My first foray into AI IF (not AIF) involved a question rather than a prompt:

+ Can you simulate a text adventure?

To be continued…

Frame Shift Drive Charging [Elite Dangerous]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, a blogger backed a Kickstarter campaign for a sequel to a classic space-opera themed computer game. Despite a rocky start, the campaign proved to be phenomenally successful - and in due course, the game was released to a warm welcome from its many fans. Feeling immensely satisfied, the blogger downloaded his free version of the game, installed it and hit the "play" button on the launcher...

...only to discover that his pre-Bronze Age PC was so low spec he had no chance of ever running it. And so the dream died and the blogger drowned his sorrows and continued with his life. When the pain wasn't too sharp he would continue to read about the game and the exploits of its pilots, and even watched in-game events streamed on YouTube.

The pre-Bronze Age PC struggled on for several few months, occasionally shaking or emitting smoke or sparks, until finally it could calculate no more and departed this earth for the greener pastures of the Cloud. It had served its master well and had had the digital equivalent of a good innings.

While the blogger mourned the loss of his faithful if pathetic companion, his heart was not entirely sad. In fact, while this may appear heartless to some, he realised that finally there was an excuse to buy a half-decent machine!
There was a moment of suspense as, once more, the "play" button depressed and the hard drive fired up - and a whole new world opened up.



The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight

I can't claim to be that far ahead of the curve on this occasion - thousands of people are already playing Elite Dangerous so there's a steep catch-up curve ahead of me. However I can report that my old BBC B docking skills have survived cryosleep and the new game isn't too difficult to pick up. I will write more about the game when I've had more of a chance to try it out.

Right On Commander

Far Out Man [Review: Out There]

Those human pilots! If they're so keen to make their way back to Earth, why do they keep getting themselves warped away from it?

Out There is a neat little space opera for Android and iPhone. You wake from cryosleep to discover your spaceship has been 2001'd into an unfamiliar galaxy. Hundreds of star systems away, you are aware of a particular star that may be important, but your first task is not to die. 

The game is turn-based and there's no combat. Well, that's not quite true. There is an enemy to discover and there is in fact a way to attack enemy fleets. But mostly, you choose the next planet or star, decide whether to land, whether to drill for resources, whether to meet the local species, whether to take over the abandoned spaceship etc. It plays a lot like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook - I have fond memories of Starship Traveller. It's also really, really hard. This is a survival-themed game - meaning you will die a lot. You can die by running out of hydrogen fuel, oxygen, or iron to patch up your hull, any of which is easy to do.

You stay alive by mining or scooping fuel, oxygen or iron from various worlds - along the way encountering aliens, discovering plans for technology to mod your ship, and experiencing random hazards and events. But as your ship only has limited storage space, and planets only yield a small amount of elements, it's hard to keep up stocks. If you've discovered a mod, you still need to mine the right elements to build it, and then it takes up even more of your hull space.

The map is random, as are many other game features, and when you die it's back to the start with a new map. However, if you're careful you can learn more about the game each time you die, and try out different strategies to survive for longer. As the game progresses, more "important" stars appear on the map, but so far I've only ever made it to one of them without dying. This is an extremely difficult game but one I've enjoyed exploring.

Mortals! You Defy The Gods! [Review: Interstellar]

Heroic archetype Cooper (Matthew McConnaughey) leaves behind his family and pilots a ring-shaped starship through a wormhole created by mysterious, godlike entities. His voyage takes him across an unfamiliar galaxy, accompanied by a crew who spend most of their time in stasis and a robot with a disturbed sense of humour. Yes! As you have probably guessed, Chris Nolan's new film Interstellar is pretty much a re-make of Ulysses 31.

Interstellar is space opera with a 21st century feel. The first act takes place on a bleak, near-future Earth where the farming ecosystem is slowly failing. The interstellar mission of the middle act is never a voyage to seek out new life and new civilizations but a desperate last chance to avert the death of humanity, and the story remains personal at all times, helped by some soul-wracking performances by McConnaughey and Anne Hathaway.

There are one or two silly scenes - the father-promises-daughter-he-will-return-home subplot (although it's there for a good reason), and the scenes where the Endurance crew brainstorm complex maneuvers and solve physics problems too quickly - it might be totally justified but it sounds like plot-hole technobabble.

On the other hand this is a compelling vision of the future, with so many elements that do make sense, including the technology. No Ulysses 31 remake would be complete without NoNo, but TARS and CASE are worthy additions to the canon of science-fiction robot companions, with their original physical design and programmable levels of honesty, sensitivity and humour. As you would expect from yet another Chris Nolan / Lee Smith collaboration, the cinematography, effects and editing are superb.

Metal Mickey [Review: The Stainless Steel Rat]

Slippery Jim Di Griz is a small-time crook with a big-time ego: one of the last few con-artists in a future where almost all crime has been eliminated, he survives by keeping one step ahead and never running the same con twice. He is proud of his achievements and views his chosen lifestyle in romantic terms, but the rat is an apt metaphor: at the start of Harry Harrison’s space opera, Jim’s current enterprise involves stealing food from the back of a warehouse.

Even with a flair for planning original crimes, not everything goes to plan for the Rat. After falling into the hands of an interstellar police force Jim sets off on a trail across the galaxy in search of a beautiful psychopath who eludes or outsmarts him at every turn and of course steals his heart. An interesting sub-plot is Slippery Jim’s aversion to killing: for Jim this is the final taboo. Nevertheless he cannot outhink his lovely prey unless he can get inside her mind: on one occasion using a mind-altering drug to draw out his own murderous tendencies.

The Stainless Steel Rat is a comedy and a satire but not a spoof: it’s comic sci-fi done right. It’s also classic space opera, and there’s always another FTL spaceship to board, steal or commandeer. Later in his writing career, Harrison wrote several novels spoofing the genre, such as Star Smashers Of The Galaxy Rangers in which the heroes discover a hyperdrive powered by cheese. However his disdain for space opera hasn’t apparently stopped Harrison from writing a further ten Stainless Steel Rat novels, the most recent of which was published in 2010. I have some reading ahead of me.

I Can't Believe It's Not Vatta [Review: Moving Target]

Moving Target is the second novel in Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War sequence. The delightfully psychopathic Kylara is stranded light years away from her family and homeworld with a loyal crew but a crippled spaceship, while the Vatta trading family and their allies, InterStellar Communications, are decimated in a series of attacks which also destroy the ansibles, the FTL communication devices that hold the various worlds together.

In the first novel Kylara faced down a series of enemies, including a shipload of mercenaries, with almost no weapons. This time she makes some effort to beef up the ship's defences but still has very limited resources, so she remains outgunned and has to apply brainpower and guts to come out on top. This is true underdog fiction and Kylara's plots and schemes continue to amaze. I can also report that the plot remains happily horse-free but points have been deducted for gratuitous puppy elements.

I have a dream

Some thoughts on The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton. I thought I'd spend a good few weeks on this lengthy book but it's only January 10th and amazingly I've run out of pages. TDV is the first in a new trilogy, set a few thousand years after the Commonwealth Saga.

This book gradually becomes more addictive. It's not original in terms of concepts or settings - human political factions with different attitudes to body or mind upgrades are a common theme in modern-day space opera, and this and the central mystery, the Void reminded me of Reynolds' writing; there are also Culture-like elements. There are plenty of ancient wise or warlike alien races, and a lot of zipping around through hyperspace or wormholes. The space-opera strand is countered by the experiences of a human colony within the Void on a world where people have varying degrees of telekinetic powers, experienced in the galaxy outside through the dreams of the faithful. This is simplistic fantasy and occasionally veers into Discworld-like territory - the hero Edeard has a little of Sam Vimes about him, but I found this strand the most captivating part of the book.

Back in the outside world most of the players (and there are a lot) are searching for something or someone and there's a lot of political machination and plotting. A religious movement founded on the Void dreams plans a massive pilgrimage into the Void but other factions believe this will trigger galactic destruction. There are a few brief bouts of action courtesy of Aaron, the maximally upgraded hitman-without-a-memory, and some bad sci-fi sex courtesy of Araminta the seemingly innocent property developer and her "multiple" partner Mr. Bovey. Different characters seem designed to bring action, comedy, sympathy or other experiences into the novel.

I enjoyed this book and thought it was well-written and structured - particularly given it's length it could easily have lost it's way but didn't. Despite the standardized settings there's a lot of originality in the actual characters and situations. Mostly the characters are convincing as motivated individuals, just occasionally they all start to speak with the same voice. I intend to go back and try the Commonwealth series in the near future and may well continue with this trilogy later.