Stranger Sips' gameplay is powered by a collaboration between the player and modern AI.
If you've seen a lot of AI content and feel like this is a terrible thing, I can understand. But if you'll walk with me a bit I'll explain why I think LLMs can be great not only for storytelling, but for player-driven narratives in particular.
The most common concern I hear about LLMs and generative AI #
First of all, hi! I'm Jeff, the creator of Stranger Sips. This article (or at least the original version of it) was 100% written by me, a real-life human. If you've used one of the many AI products out there to replace some search engines, to get questions answered, to explore topics that are new to you, or to try to learn something more formal like science or mathemetics, it's likely that you have run into one of the biggest concerns that people have with AI: it has a tendency to make things up, to act very confident about it, and to not flinch in the face of misinformation. This behavior is commonly referred to a "hallucination", and when it comes to trying to get high-quality factual information this can be quite problematic.
However, when you're playing a game in a fictional world, making up stories turns out to be just the kind of thing you need for unexpected twists and turns! Stranger Sips is a fictional game, so having a technology that allows the player to get a unique, customized fictional world turns out to be pretty amazing.
I love hand-crafted games and works of art, so what's this all about? #
This whole AI thing is new to all of us. I love hand-crafted games lovingly made by super talented people. So, when I thought about making a game that leveraged AI I had a lot of concerns. Will the game feel generic? Will it not make any sense? Will the AI start to ramble and trail off into nonsense?
But I decided to create a very simple prototype: a user interface where you could talk to an NPC that had the rough outline of a personal background, and see where it would go. I figured that if the AI was going to make things up then maybe it could make up stories, and maybe I could interact with those stories in ways that actually felt new and different from scripted games. That turned out to be true, but what I didn't expect is that the AI actually had a kind of consistency that I didn't account for. Namely that while it would make up totally fictional things, that it would at least stick to those things and basically help me collaboratively create a fictional world that felt pretty self-consistent.
What this means in Stranger Sips is that you can start a chat with an NPC, get to know them, ask them about their hopes and fears and upbringing, and like an improv partner the game will play along with your imagination and build a little world along with you. It also meant that I could leave a conversation and start a brand new chat with the exact same NPC, except this time it would conjure up a new set of hallucinations and we could go on another adventure together. Hm, replayability!
So, after chatting with NPCs on my computer for a few weeks I decided to change that initial prototype into a slightly larger game, put it online, and start sharing it with all of you! What I've found is that the most fun way to play is to remember the kinds of stories you used to dream up as a kid, the kinds of magical mystical places that only existed in your mind, except now you could conjure them up into an interactive medium! When it actually worked I was frankly surprised.
But I'm just getting started. I think there are many directions this can go, and I'm looking forward to continuing to enrich the world of Stranger Sips with more of this imaginative gameplay, deeper worlds, and richer backstories. I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with it too!
