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Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

I think it will be a long long time before we see an LLM generating a genuinely novel, interesting and fun to play mystery game.

Good mysteries involve providing just enough hints so that the player can make the fun leaps of logic and experience "Aha!" moments. People don't want to play the job of a real detective (collect endless witness statements, construct extremely detailed timelines) they want to be the hero in a detective story, making clever deductions.

LLMs might be able to generate characters and dialogue but they're going to struggle to come up with completely new ideas and mystery mechanics like Her Story

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> People don't want to play the job of a real detective (collect endless witness statements, construct extremely detailed timelines)

You underestimate how many people would be really into what you described. Lots of wildly popular games are work in a fun-looking package. Factorio is just programming. Football Manager, and every other sports manager game for that matter, is spreadsheet after spreadsheet with some cool graphics.

That is what the tech demo does, each actor has a prompt that includes what that person knows about the situation and how they should dicuss it but the story itself was designed by a human. The prompts for the actors were written to make the discussions interesting and useful for deducing what happened. So perhaps Actor A saw a mysterious man, Actor B heard the noises and has a better idea of the timelime, and a different detective has already examined the physical clues so you can discuss them with that actor.

It's really interesting but it's also of course really easy to break out of sensibility, and hard to properly gamify. Like you said people don't actually want the tedious part of detective work, they want the fun parts that make them feel like Sherlock.

The game Shadows of Doubt is a great example of how the information flow of detective work is really difficult to balance, I think they did a great job but if you run out of really strong clues, clues that link things together, the game becomes a brute force exercise in talking to everyone and asking the same questions.

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