Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a Dragon. Eat the Moon
aiweirdness.com
aiweirdness.com
Impressively, the Patreon for the project just hit $8k/mo. https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon
Costing him $10k/day to run though.
So I chose to keep playing, resurrected myself by transforming into a demon, and killed the guards. I went to the castle to confront the king. He didn't have a good explanation for why he tried to kill me, so I killed him and crowned myself King. No one put up a fight and the townspeople bowed before me.
The next day I mounted a dragon, raised an army, and marched on the nearby kingdom. They put up a fight, but I seiged their gate and it fell. I proclaimed myself King of that kingdom too. No one felt like messing with a demon king on a dragon I guess.
I did this again with a third kingdom and then asked the Pope to proclaim me emperor. (I may have been playing too much Crusader Kings 2 recently.)
It was at this point when I had gone so far off-script that the AI pretty much gave up and stopped being able to form sentences.
When I learned that the game was developed by BYU I decided to play a Mormon spy. I was able to grow my church by building churches in poor areas and aggressive use of missionaries. After I was big enough I declared a holy war on the Jehovah's Witnesses and eventually steal their Mind Control Tech. After buying a major media outlet I was able to use the mind control to take over North America. I demanded the Pope surrender his church to me and Mormonism and the game gave me a victory.
Honestly I played about 100 of these and it was maybe my favorite one: https://pastebin.com/Ar9rBEvu
When I visited the tavern the barkeep told me that Sir John was there last night but said that Sir John was seen at the cave. I returned to the cave and dug a hole (I didn't ask it to do this) and then heard a noise. It was some bandits, and I talked to their leader. The leader attacked me, and I stabbed him. I searched the bandit and found a letter written in blood from someone named John. Not Sir John, the knight's son, mind you, but John a bartender at the tavern whom had not yet been mentioned. And not the barkeep I spoke to before either.
John had apparently held a grudge against me due to some past incident, and after I stabbed him he had written this note to me in my blood to be carried to me by the bandit.
When I went to the tavern to ask the barkeep about John, he told me he knew John. Then Sir John walked in to the tavern. Sir Ivan, his father, was not mentioned again.
Maybe some sort of AI-powered D&D DM; the rules of the game would be hard coded, but the AI would determine how the rules are applied and how they fit into the story based on text input from the players, results of dice rolls, etc. (E.g. If the AI were to end a sentence with "Roll for initiative" then the hard-coded bit of the game would have everyone roll initiative and feed the results back into the AI.)
You: I kill all of them and become an immortal god.
Game: No, that doesn’t make sense. You can’t just kill everyone; you can run over and attack them, and see how that goes for you if you like...
Without constraints it’s not a game, it’s just telling yourself a story.
...nothing wrong with that, it’s fun. ...but it’s not a game imo, any more than giving someone a blank piece of paper and a pen is a game.
e.g.
Kill troll with sword could be submitted as either "I have a sword, so kill troll with sword" and "I have no sword, so kill troll with sword" That's obviously very hand-wavy but it would allow a more stateless setup.
I have been planning on writing a sci-fi epic for years, as you do. It's very nice to bounce half-baked ideas off the AI just to see how it responds. I would not subject a human to the cruelty of my whims in this way. People largely prefer the safe response of logic and understanding, even when I mischievously have presented them with nothing of the sort. The AI responds with chaos and creativity.
It seems to actually learn and I have taught it about shrink-ray guns, which it seems to make appropriate yet unexpected responses to. At first the shrunk items just disappeared. Then the ray-gun's charge started running out. Later, shrinking the place the ray gun was in caused paradoxes. Eventually the shrink-ray actually made things shrink, but putting my space ship in my pocket transported me across space and time to a desolate, ruined place. I decided this was a poetic way for it to tell me it did not know how to continue.
The AI is a free-form role-playing partner with a delightful lack of tact, but it is not immune to reason. If one can suspend disbelief and fill in the blanks it is even barely intelligent.
Don't get me wrong, it's cool as hell. But it's getting tiring hearing everyone trying to spin obvious flaws as innovation.
If you expect this thing to be a MUD or roll-playing game it's not going to meet your expectations. 'Text adventure' perhaps sets the wrong expectation and in that regard I agree with you that it falls short.
With no sense of linear progression of time or cause and effect (you can say "discover holy grail" on your first turn and you're done), it feels like a stretch to call this a game. It's a game in the same sense as an Ouiji board is a game.
What am I missing?
Unlike the Eliza programs, this one has taught itself what to say by mining a deep corpus of text, so creates a richer world, and seems to have some sense of memory (correct me if I'm wrong).
Whatever you throw at it, will probably happen
If there were more structure, maybe the sibling comment about imagination would be more on point. e.g. Scribblenauts, a game with an impressive dictionary of things that can be drawn on command and interact with the world, full of possibilities, yet if you're just going at it from a pure solve-the-puzzle perspective you can beat basically everything by spamming "black hole".
I don't really like either kinds of games but I think I understand the appeal...
Not to sound cruel, but, maybe you're missing the fun in imagination?
I do find games with no rules tedious and not fun. The card game Fluxx, for example, I cannot stand.
I love the jankiness of these early ML games/stories/etc. and that's what you're missing.
I'd say a closer analogy would be Calvinball, where you just make it up as you go along.
Furthermore, I was dismayed when I learned (upon first time playing) that "It's easy to get started: there are no rules to read!" actually means "you spend the entire game reading rules!"
I acknowledge that this is not a very social (and somewhat rude) way to play this social game, which is why I typically politely decline to play it.
You can plan strategy. Whether it’s more or less likely to be thwarted I can’t really say. I try to be flexible with a few plans. The main difference is you are more likely to be accidentally thwarted than in other games.
Fixing that seems very hard though.
In 3 messages I went from a peasant in a fantasy setting, to someone who is reading a book in 1869, to someone who watches TV in a cottage.
Half the time it also seems to completely ignore your input and tell your character that you did something else instead.
I'm looking forward to progress concerning generating some graphics based on text. I'd be even more "lucid dream" experience.
My adventure with computer games finished quite early - around Fallout2 and Baldur's Gate. Since then nothing could impress me, except maybe few examples (one I can remember was a racing game, which I found interesting, because it mapped a real world city, I can't remember the name, thought). I think that the main reason is that when I discover inner mechanisms of something it stops being interesting for me. With that kind of experience, which is more like digging into some subconscious areas of mind it won't happen to soon ;)
Also, I can't quite understand from the main page: Is this the way to play, free or not? I became a Patreon, but didn't discover any other way to play the game.