I wondered why this article was so high on the front page but now I realize it’s simply because everyone else wanted to “um actually” it. I guess that makes sense.
Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.
I think AI could reinvent text based games in a fresh way that would be fun. Text based games were always so constrained by what the developer could guess that you would type but with AI it really could read more like an interactive choose your own adventure novel that is easy to navigate.
These are kinda popular today in the form of AI Dungeon, NovelAI, FictionLab etc.
Basically you create characters with bios, traits. Then a setting/context. Now, as you write your story, you can have multiple characters involved and they'll act from their perspective and traits.
Then these also have lorebooks with triggers, so if you mention The Barking Dog Inn, the AI and the characters will know what you mean and your characters with an outgoing personality type will be more eager to go there than others etc.
Finally, these systems usually have a long term memory where key events are saved and the AI remembers.
In earlier text adventures (e.g., Infocom games), some portion of those constraints were due to the authors failing to anticipate legitimate ways that users would try to phrase things and account for them in the game. But that's not nearly such a problem in anything made since the late '90s, especially if you stick to xyzzy award winners.
The more essential reason for that constraint is that it's just good storytelling. The author of a work of IF has an idea they want to explore. That main idea could be narrative (Photopia or Anchorhead), or it could be a gameplay mechanic (Savoir-Faire or Counterfeit Monkey). But in any case, if your goal is to appreciate the creator's vision, those constraints are critical because they telegraph to you, the player, what you should and should not be exploring.
This isn't an idea that's specific to text adventures, either. The creators of the Outer Wilds deliberately made areas flat and boring when there wasn't anything there for the player to do to advance the story, specifically because they didn't want players wasting time on exploration that would ultimately prove to be pointless. This is also why open world games that do go for a more uniformly detailed world also need to hand-hold the player and tell them where they need to go every step of the way. Without that players would tend to get lost, lose their sense of progress, and ultimately end up bored.
I think that, because of this dynamic, using AI to flesh out the unimportant bits of the game would be a cardinal game design sin. Making bloat cheap and easy does not make it good. I just makes more of it.
There is a new text based game using AI called Lifespans. You create a character, and live out a simulated life. You can make any decision or action that you want, and there is a D20 roll mechanic to make sure that your decisions make sense. You can play it at lifespans.app
As another commenter points out, this sort of exists in the broader sense of "interactive fiction." There's lots of options for scaffolding an LLM into something like a storytelling toy.
But I truly believe an AI-generated equivalent of Zork or Lost Pig is decades away. The "knowing what it is talking about problem" is not even close to being solved, no matter how impressive coding agents have become. It is simply too easy to sabotage clever game design with accidentally adversarial prompting.
More generally: LLMs are still unfunny except in cases of clear plagiarism. This also extends to making fun games.
This is a prime example of how lazy vibe coding makes people. Even if they were not technical, some of these bugs would have been caught if they just went through the behaviour by hand at least once. Not an ounce of QA just generate and ship.
Knowing cable companies that was probably until all contracts with that channel as part of the subscription ended. They had to keep the channel running otherwise they might need to refund people.
All the jobs I rather be doing are antiquated. Furniture maker but it’s not a viable job anymore either. A machinist, tool-die maker. Or mechanic maybe. I have always thought that mechanics are just debugging a very specific architecture. None of these make money though.
Honestly, it seems to me that it's "undoing" a lot of work.
Labor Rate at dealerships around me are over $200/h. Granted the mechanic doesn't get 100% of that but 200 * 52 * 8 is nearly 600k. It seems like you could go somewhere else and get the same amount of money as Ford (or more) and don't need to worry about future salary increases not occurring.
The problem is that the mechanics are paid fixed hours for a given type of job (according to the dealership's standard for how long a given job should take). They are not truly being paid per hour. While it's supposed to encourage efficiency, you can imagine how this negatively affects the mechanics as well as the work quality outcomes.
A friend of mine is getting ready to retire after 30-odd years in IT. He has already tooled up and trained for his retirement profession: farrier; the guy who makes and installs horse shoes. It's more profitable than it used to be since few people do it any more, and farriers typically work on their own schedule.
A company that used to be the pinnacle of software development is now just generating code in order to sell their big data models. Horrifying. Devastating.
