Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games

I think in the context of natural language for game worlds, "prose" is targeting the much lower bar of something that sounds like a human might write it, vs like "you PLACED KEY in THE LEFT DOOR. Proceed to A STAIRCASE" from games of yore. Understanding the much richer space of literary prose, such as the difference between the Shire and Westeros, seems like a harder problem, but also one that might be well suited for existing NLP training pipelines, because you can label a large amount of text with only a few descriptors. It might be tough to come to a consensus amongst literary experts what those descriptors should be, but e.g. if LOTR book 1 is "pastoral" and ASOIAF book 1 is "gritty", you've now got a lot of text associated to each of those labels. I wonder if anyone is working on this?

This is amazing!! I have to get back to work now, but this is very very cool!

here's the first 5 minutes of my adventure:

Pick a setting... Apocalyptic

Select a character... Courier

You are Chris, a courier trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world by scavenging among the ruins of what is left. You have a parcel of letters and a small pistol. It's a long and dangerous road from Boston to Charleston, but you're one of the only people who knows the roads well enough to get your parcel of letters there. You set out in the morning and hope to have it in your hands by the time the sun goes down, or else you know you'll never get it there.

You walk down the road and realize that you must be close to the highway. You hold the parcel of letters in your hands and read them.

Dear Chris, It's time for you to get to Charleston. The old man was insistent on this, so you'll be making the trip. You search for a vehicle.

You walk onto the highway and look for a vehicle for yourself. After a time, you see one in the distance, a small hatchback. You check if the small hatchback is operational.

You walk over to the small hatchback and look inside. It looks like it has never been used, and the interior is very clean. You open the door and climb inside. You use the relative position of the rising sun to orient yourself and drive south.

You turn the key and start the small car. It sounds like a lawn mower and comes to life with a burst of smoke. It purrs to life and you back out of the crowded parking lot. You continue driving south.

You drive down the road, glancing at the fuel gauge as you go. It seems to indicate half a tank, which seems unlikely, but you cannot be sure. You continue driving south and look for fuel.

You continue driving south and look for fuel at every station. You come up empty at each one. It is a long and boring drive, and you find yourself staring at the ceiling of the car more and more often. courier Created: Jan 3rd 2022 at 4:20PM Updated: Jan 3rd 2022 at 4:26PM Actions: 14 0 You are Chris, a courier trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world by scavenging among the ruins of what is left. You have a parcel of letters and a small pistol. It's a long and dangerous road from Boston to Charleston, but you're one of the only people who knows the roads well enough to get your parcel of letters there. You set out in the morning and hope to have it in your hands by the time the sun goes down, or else you know you'll never get it there.

You walk down the road and realize that you must be close to the highway.

> You hold the parcel of letters in your hands and read them.

Dear Chris, It's time for you to get to Charleston. The old man was insistent on this, so you'll be making the trip.

> You search for a vehicle.

You walk onto the highway and look for a vehicle for yourself. After a time, you see one in the distance, a small hatchback.

> You check if the small hatchback is operational.

You walk over to the small hatchback and look inside. It looks like it has never been used, and the interior is very clean. You open the door and climb inside.

> You use the relative position of the rising sun to orient yourself and drive south.

You turn the key and start the small car. It sounds like a lawn mower and comes to life with a burst of smoke. It purrs to life and you back out of the crowded parking lot.

> You continue driving south.

You drive down the road, glancing at the fuel gauge as you go. It seems to indicate half a tank, which seems unlikely, but you cannot be sure.

> You continue driving south and look for fuel.

You continue driving south and look for fuel at every station. You come up empty at each one. It is a long and boring drive, and you find yourself staring at the ceiling of the car more and more often. View Adventure Ai Dungeon Logo

Maybe "an interface to a traditional world sim with more window dressing", is all you need?

Especially if the traditional world sim is fairly rich itself (not like, as rich as the most rich that had been made before, but still decent), and the way the GPT part connects to it is good enough.

I think what Gwern is proposing is perhaps better seen by you as an optimization for the current AID rather than a "true" CYOA novel implementation. Because most of what you said applies to AID as well. I toyed with it a bit, but even short snippets of text are often incoherent and I have to give it a lot of grace to operate. In particular, while I don't necessarily mind the way it'll just introduce a new character, I don't like the way they disappear equally quickly and without fanfare.

While AID's nominal attraction is the ability to react to anything, I think based on the evidence only a small percentage of the users end up using it that way. (It's possible they're all the long term users, in which case they are important, but I still think it's a small proportion of the users.) The vast majority of the users the vast majority of the time will be selecting from a small handful of options that would constitute the vast majority of responses.

To the extent you'd find the resulting CYOA rather unappealing, I'd say the current AID is pretty much unappealing in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons, and given that AID hasn't exactly taken the world by storm I imagine this is the majority view. (Though it may have the sort of inner core rabid fanbase that you can still build on as a business.)

With a branching factor of 5 it won't take long before every person playing has made an unique sequence of choices, so I don't think caching would help you as much as you'd think. You could maybe cheaply serve the people who try a couple of decisions and then get bored.

It could make a good landing page though - play for 10 steps and then spring the "subscribe to continue your adventure".