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Comment by jgalt212 | Hacker News Reader

MUDs would work great inside WhatsApp.

The complete opposite of Raspberry Pi, but I predict that one result of generative AI models is we will end up with over 1 million concurrent players on MUDs.

#1 Dramatic simplification of navigation and actions, making them accessible for new users

#2 Significantly better role-playing enabled through NPC characters

#3 Access & visualization medium by choice: text, narration/voice, image, video, 3D

If I had the free time this is what I would work on now. I've messed around with LLM RPGs, but the big piece is there needs to be a stored structure to get around the context model issues, or at minimum reduce costs and speed up use since we now have huge context models.

I have half a MUD that uses TTS and speech-to-text as the interface with LLMs generating the content and a database keeping the context. It works surprisingly well.

Slight tangent, but The Whale's Keeper (https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=5k15omg0bdbddxfr) was an IFComp entry last year, built on a game engine for chat apps (https://plotopolis.com/). I'm not sure how much the format contributed, but did enjoy the game.

MUDs would work great with CarPlay and ChatGPT to convert input to structured text. Ouput would just be ai audio. It would be like an interactive podcast

Just be careful when approaching actual current MUD gamers with that idea. They're largely cynical towards AI. I don't really blame them, a lot of people coming at /r/mud with new ideas are either lazy, misinformed, or crypto bros.

LLMs leave a lot to be desired when it comes to boundary enforcement. Your entire party of little African boys could fall into a mile-deep hole and nothing stops all of them from escaping using the power of their flighty farts.

Then we get to the arcane textbook-sized rulesets people write to enforce basic things like "chests are closed by default and can only be opened with the appropriate key and must be opened before contents can be seen or retrieved and items can only be retrieved one at a time but only within the constraints of the encumbrance system" at which point you might as well just use the LLM to generate Inform 7 code.

I'm not a programmer, just a humanities nerd on Hacker News. AI would be indeed bad for that at the moment. It could be an endless source of fluff, amusement, and roleplay hooks. In many MUDs, you are required to stay in character. But AI is no good for anything of mechanical consequence.

But it doesn't matter, the MUD community seems already annoyed by bad AI proposals. It would take a good and consistent communication effort to overcome that.

> not a programmer, just a humanities nerd

Inform 7 was written for people like yourself. Check it out. The syntax is prosaic enough for a humanities nerd to write and structured enough for ChatGPT4 to generate.

Contrived example:

> The Exhibition Room is a room. It contains a closed locked lockable transparent openable container called the display case. The display case contains a priceless pearl. The display case is scenery. The description of the Exhibition Room is "By far the finest thing in the room is a priceless pearl in a glass display case. It should of course be yours[if key is not visible], if only you can remember where you hid the key[end if]."

> The silver key unlocks the display case.

> A jade vase, a teak chest, a bronze teakettle, and a child's burial casket are openable closed containers in the Exhibition Room.

> After taking the pearl: say "The pearl rolls into your hand, gleaming in the oblique light; your fortune is made."

> end the story finally.

https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/book/WI_1_1.html

That's awesome, thanks!

I am aware of Inform 7, I think it is awesome. A few months ago I made a quick demo using Inklescript[1], which I found simpler and more suitable to my project (a Star Trek adventure). Inform 7 remains something I wish to explore in the future when I need something more complex.

Thanks! ;)

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[1] https://www.inklestudios.com/ink/

I think AI could be useful in MUD clients, to show a picture of where the player is, and in the future that might even be a moving picture showing the combat moves.

That is already possible with ASCII graphics or graphically at the client level.

Depends on the MUD type. I used to play, admin, and sysadmin on AVATAR MUD, and the sheer text scroll of a large group in combat just wouldn't translate to WhatsApp. A lot of the players used TinyFugue with complexish state management in the scripting to highlight things going on in the combat output.

Now, Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as a text adventure game over WA could be interesting for some people.

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