AI Is Reimagining the Way We Play Role-Playing Games

 Hidden Door builds an AI game master that could run your next tabletop RPG.

Players have been enjoying tabletop role-playing games for decades, ever since Dungeons & Dragons meant a group of people gathered around a table with handwritten character sheets. You can now create a digital character table that automatically changes as your character levels up, and there are tons of ways to play D&D online. But the next leap in RPGs could involve adventures set in familiar fictional worlds and guided by artificial intelligence.

That's what Hidden Door wants to do, and CEO Hilary Mason brings two decades of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning to the project. I spoke with Mason about the recent explosion of artificial intelligence, the opportunities and risks, and how her company is using the technology to reinvent the classic gaming genre, starting with The Wizard of Oz.

Artificial intelligence burst into the cultural consciousness late last year, led by services like Dall-E and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Then Microsoft and Google responded with their own AI-powered tools, creating even more buzz around the technology. However, there were some issues as the AI ​​tools were prone to misinformation and in some cases were a bit bizarre, prompting Microsoft to introduce restrictions. Now it looks like there's an arms race between the big tech companies to see how best to get the most out of AI.

Hidden Door takes a creative approach to technology.

"I played a lot of D&D and other board games all the way through high school," Mason said of the creation of Hidden Door. "Many of my best social moments, especially in my 20s, came from this shared creative play with friends around the table." When she realized the window was opening to create this dynamic with AI, she knew she had to give it a try.

Mason said Hidden Door is trying to tap into people's desire to engage more with stories after they've read or watched them. If you've ever watched a movie and thought, "Wait, I'm not done with this world and these characters yet," Hidden Door wants to offer more ways to work in those stories.

According to Mason, the company only works directly with creators who want to license their intellectual property or use works that are in the public domain. Players can take these worlds and ask the game to set them in different moods or genres. You can do the same with Dungeons & Dragons, but Hidden Door brings a technological twist to the RPG experience.

Meet the AI ​​behind the curtain

Hidden Door begins with literary and cinematic classics and allows players to request a preferred twist on the setting. "Our first adaptation is The Wizard of Oz, which is in the public domain. ... You can go into our system and be like, I want The Wizard of Oz, but you know, rough murder — or I want The Wizard of Oz, but it's fun pancake time.”

But what was it about the AI ​​that helped make this idea happen?

Hidden Door uses AI trained on "millions of stories" to power its in-game storyteller, the equivalent of a dungeon master or game master. The Narrator prompts players for situations and obstacles and asks them how they want to respond. Players can enter what they would like to do and then choose from the options provided by the full-sentence narrator. Each input moves the game forward and causes the narrator to generate reactions and new situations. Mason said the goal is to give people ways to play with language and interpret it in the appropriate context.

The rules for the world are set by the IP owner and created in collaboration with the game designer and authors of Hidden Door. "Basically, we're trying to give them the ability to say, this has to happen in this world. This character should always be like that. And then we use generative bits to fill in the blanks in a way that's consistent with that."

Under the hood, Mason describes the game as a group of "highly tunable weights and knobs" that allow Hidden Door to tweak the system to be more consistent with what they want it to do, even if the players feel very open. . "At any point in the story, we can't predict what's going to come out. But we can examine it, and we can go back and [ask], OK, what were the scales set here? What are the parts of the story in the engine that we pulled in?" The Hidden Door team looks at the library of tropes that the AI ​​combines to create a story and can adjust parameters or otherwise tweak the model for a better gameplay experience.

One question developers focus on is whether the computer did something unexpected or wrong. If they get feedback like the story isn't surprising, that's another knob the team can tweak. In the same way that a dungeon master can adjust the pace of a D&D game if he feels the players are getting bored, the AI ​​Hidden Door narrator can adjust the game to make it more surprising. Hidden Door developers can tweak the surprise factor to keep players engaged without making things too psychedelic.

Opening doors with AI

Mason says he hopes the AI ​​narrator will help lower barriers to entry. "It takes a lot of work to run a good game. Like when one of your friends takes over as the storyteller, the GM, they have to do a lot of preparation."

Can be confirmed. I've run a few D&D campaigns for friends and it really takes a significant investment of time and energy from a game master to run a good session - newer players may struggle to find someone willing to put in that much effort. Even if you find someone who is the creative workhorse, you're still at the mercy of how quickly they can pull those ideas together and get ready for a session. Hidden Door's goal is to use the generative capabilities of artificial intelligence to take that work off the human shoulders and let people jump in and play. "The way we see it, it basically allows a lot more people to have this kind of gaming experience because it reduces the amount of work involved," Mason said.

Mason stressed that the goal wasn't to replace GMs at the tables, but rather to give people more options, especially when it comes to the types of intellectual property that Hidden Door will be using.

And while AI powers the system, Mason thinks Hidden Door's appeal isn't limited to the novelty of AI. Instead, he hopes people will be drawn to a game that's similarly accessible to RPG video games like Dragon Age and The Witcher, but even more open-ended. "We don't think our players have to care at all that it's an AI game. Like for them it's just a story game where they can pick anything and it'll play out."