
The Automated Dungeon Master - cfmcdonald
https://technicshistory.com/2020/01/23/tangent-the-automated-dungeon-master/
======
Animats
That went on for a long time before getting to the point.

 _" Trained on gigabytes of input, GPT-2 is uncannily good at producing
sensible text by simply predicting the next word that should follow a given
list of input words."_

There are now a few systems like that - autocomplete with a big text database.
They have no underlying model of what they're talking about. So, after about
three sentences, you realize the output makes no sense. It's just words strung
together with probabilities that match known text.

This seems to be where machine learning gets stuck. There needs to be some
underlying model of the subject matter to have a useful dialog. Outside of
well defined subject areas (sports, weather, travel planning, shopping, etc.)
that barely exists. Frustrating to see this half a century after Eliza.

Chatbots have the same problem. Either they force you onto a specific track,
like a phone tree, or they just natter endlessly without going anywhere. I've
been playing around with Rasa lately. This is a chatbot which uses Tensorflow
to match user questions with canned answers. That's about all they get from
the machine learning part. Outside of that it's a phone tree engine. There's a
file of "smalltalk" questions and answers, so it can natter better.

 _What do we want? Chatbots!_

 _When do we want them? Sorry, I don 't understand the question."_ \- bag at
chatbot conference.

~~~
thomasahle
I suppose the NLP idea has been for first RNN and LSTM and now that
Transformer and friends to act as a kind of memory. Mostly those memories have
been pretty black box however, and it is interesting if ideas from data
structures etc. could be useful.

~~~
sombremesa
Ideas from "data structures" will keep you stuck in the problem GP is talking
about. The problem being lamented isn't that we don't know clever tricks for
representing the training that a machine has undergone (as well as various
tricks for having 'memory'), it's that for there to be a meaningful output for
certain domains, there needs to be a thoughtfully implemented model that codes
what it is to be (for example) a DM. Said model is, of course, ridiculously
complex, so we won't see anyone coding it by hand anytime soon. We'd sooner
have ways to copy the relevant bits of a human brain.

------
cfmcdonald
Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

A few of you mentioned Dwarf Fortress. I am aware of it, and considered adding
a section on it after Elder Scrolls, but this was already twice the length of
one of my usual posts, and I wanted to 'ship it.'

It was pointed out that I only presented two alternatives in my conclusion,
but there's a third of a super-dense procedurally generated world a la Dwarf
Fortress. I agree this was an oversight on my part. This points in the
direction of an interesting subtlety about whether a rigorous simulation is
what you really want at all - the DM 'simulates' a world in a way that is
highly biased towards adventure, excitement and fun.

I may go back and revise to try to bring in some of these points at a later
date.

One person mentioned the Mythic GM simulator, I'm aware of that also, but a)
it's a very niche product and b) it still requires _someone_ to GM, that
person may just also be the sole player. It does provide a biasing function so
that you can by 'surprised' by outcomes and guide your own adventure in
unplanned directions. It actually is more in the realm of a DM aid, as some
have mentioned this may be the most fruitful direction for AI, as an aid
rather than a replacement for a DM.

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jammygit
As a dungeon master, I have to say I did not expect my job to be automated so
quickly

~~~
prox
Would you want to? I also wonder the goal vs the means. Do I want a virtual
DM? Part of the experience/journey is the social component/ enjoyment of a
campaign.

A part of me hoped he mentioned Skyrim in his article, since it is a landmark
edition (and same can be said for the two earlier titles) in the sense that
people still create new content and adventures for it almost a decade on.
Creating an endless adventure.

Some are working on an open source implementation of it, and it would be
interesting to see that work.

------
qznc
I agree with the conclusion that AI dungeon might be the first glimpse of new
kind of roleplaying game.

One tiny point i miss in the article is a reference to Dwarf Fortress,
probably the most advanced fantasy world simulation.

~~~
seanhunter
Yes. DF shows that with a complex simulation, emergent behaviour is enough to
make for a very compelling game experience. Similar dynamics are at work in
other simulation games such as rimworld, factorio and oxygen not included
(obviously not in the fantasy genre). However I do think having a human
involved could sometimes make the DF experience better by tipping the scales
in favour of a more fun experience rather than what DF players call a "Fun"
experience.

For example, recently I built a beautiful fort. Everything was working great
and all my idiot dwarves were happy. Fluid dynamics worked slightly
differently from my expectation and confusion around the presence or absence
of a wall caused by the tileset meant that I went to fill my well I had a
whole river running down through my base and slowly filling it up from the
bottom with no accessible top entrance remaining. I had the choice of letting
my guys drown or a massive grind to fix the problem during which probably
2/3rds of my base would have starved to death and/or gone into a tantrum
deathspiral. I chose to just stop and start a new fort. An experienced human
DM could well have decided to essentially change the rules of the simulation
and thereby given me some out that allowed me to rescue the situation through
heroic effort and sacrifice and get back on track.

This is the problem with pure emergent behaviour from complex simulation.
There's lots of interesting stuff that can happen, but you can paint yourself
into very boring corners also and the simulation doesn't care about that.

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ogre_codes
It is easy to see a procedurally created game replacing a mediocre GM.

But it's extremely difficult to see any kind of procedurally created game
being able to create the sort of experience you get with a really good GM.

It is the difference between writing a story together or playing along in
someone else's story.

~~~
Pfhreak
> It is the difference between writing a story together or playing along in
> someone else's story.

A 100% this, a good GM actually doesn't really know much about where the story
is going -- you play to find out what happens. I also have a hard time
imagining an automated DM effectively 'failing forward'. Every skill check
players make should change the game state, pass or fail.

Never, ever let your players roll the dice and tell them "Sorry, you don't see
anything". Every check should be an opportunity to move the story... somehow.

~~~
setr
This is actually why I think it's viable. The mistake is that crpgs try to
tell a very particular story, and procedural generation stops at creation. But
that's not the GM's job.

The GM's role is to create and _simulate_ the universe, and to fudge the
simulation (and the players) a little to keep it entertaining.

And (sufficient) simulation is definitely something we can hope to do --
though few games really try.

But the automation has a slightly different role than your GM.. it's goal is
not to "move the story forward", but rather to craft a universe so interesting
the players will move forward on their own! The automation should not be
rolling to find out whether something is behind the door.. it should simply be
checking if the simulated creature has wandered there.

The drudgery of true simulation then must be mitigated, and the tools for
mitigation are the job of the game designer and the hueristics of the
simulation. That is, you need not simulate the atom, nor the food &
lifecycles; just enough of the system to allow it to change and adapt on its
own (and ideally be self-stabilizing to a degree; probably best done by
acknowledging the players only explore a single dungeon, but it's affected by
a world outside of it; this is the opportunity to inject whatever corrections
are necessary to stabilize the environment, avoiding the problems of Ultima
Online)

~~~
citizenkeen
I disagree - the current RPG trend is away from simulating a world and towards
crafting a narrative.

> The automation should not be rolling to find out whether something is behind
> the door.. it should simply be checking if the simulated creature has
> wandered there.

The better example is the GM deciding if there's anything interesting that
could be behind the door. If yes, then you're rolling to find out the terms of
the engagement. If no, if it's not interesting, then you're done. There's
nothing behind the door.

To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively
interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little
way off from that.

~~~
setr
>the current RPG trend is away from simulating a world and towards crafting a
narrative.

Yes, making the mistake of the mediocre GM -- trying to lead the player(s)
into following _your_ story, instead of enabling them to create their own. The
ideal GM (at least, for me, someone who strongly prefers ADnD to DnD5)
_maximizes player agency, while constraining it by the rules of the universe_
(and also operating as a manager, because you're dealing with meatbags where
one guy will happily try to spend 5 hours dicking around in the bar when the
rest of the party wants to go to the dungeon, and another idiot will be trying
to "troll" the group, in the most uninteresting fashion).

The core narrative (and every GM inherently brings with him a narrative he
wants to tell) is incentivized, in much the same way any open world videog-
game RPG has a main questline, but the ideal GM allows for departure from it
as long as its interesting.

The narrative-focused GM, and RPG, will only allow such a deviation so far as
it doesn't detract from the main narrative, because there is only one
narrative the GM has interest in telling.

Narrative-focused RPGs may be the current trend, but that doesn't make it a
good trend.

>To automate that, an AI would need to be able to gauge how "narratively
interesting or emotionally meaningful" something is. I think we're a little
way off from that.

You're correct, but my point is that we don't actually need, or even really
want that, for our imaginary automaton.

Humans, by their nature, will bring the emotional impact, and fill in the
details of the narrative, _entirely on their own_ , if they are enabled to do
so. They will assign personalities to blank-slate NPCs, they will craft their
own reasons for doing whatever they do, they will spin their own tale, so long
as the system will allow it (and as long as its sufficiently limited; for
whatever reason, limitations breed creativity). You just need to provide an
environment that reacts to the players, and sufficiently interesting ways for
the player to interact with the environment.

Give them a gravity/portal gun and players will come up with all kinds of
stories..

In a tabletop, the GM enables the reactive behaviors of what would otherwise
be a static map. In a cRPG, lacking the GM, you get a static map (except for
very specifically defined reactions, usually determined by narrative events).
In most open world rpgs, you get a large map and multiple narratives, but
still rather static. In a simulation, you get the reactive environment; the
closer the RPG approximates a simulation, the closer we get to the GM's role
-- to react to player input (rather than prescribe it)

This is in much the same way that _any game can be fun_ if you toss in
multiplayer, and give players sufficient controls -- the players will do all
the hard work of setting goals, spinning tales, emotionally attaching
themselves to arbitrary constructs.

Games don't need narratives, they need agency. Then the narratives come for
free.

~~~
citizenkeen
You conflate "narrative" and "GM-controlled narrative". These are not the same
thing.

The current trend enables player agency because the table as a group decides
the narrative, not just the GM. It's about the table as a whole deciding what
it most narratively interesting to happen right now.

------
Fjolsvith
Probably the game that is closest to being full AI would be Dwarf Fortress.
You can play it in Adventure mode and you can literally talk with NPC's who
all have backstories and lives.

~~~
Supermancho
It's unlikely that the author knows much about DF. The final conclusion, is
missing the third possibility which DF has managed to achieve.

There are so many procedural permutations that it's effectively an innumerable
number of (often clunky) combinations which lack much structure.

------
Mountain_Skies
When I saw Telengard played on a friend's Commodore 64, I thought for sure it
was the end of Dungeons & Dragons forever. Who would want to bother with
getting a DM and buying lots of books when you could get the same thing from a
computer whenever you wanted?

Glad I was wrong!

~~~
soylentcola
Telengard was great fun, but it was still similar to a rogue-like in the sense
that you were just walking around a dungeon trying to kill, loot, and not die.

I always heard it was procedurally generated but the layout was always the
same for me. Looking into it, it seems that to save on memory, the levels are
"generated" on the fly, but from a set of seed numbers that were hard coded
into the game and didn't change.

I tried mapping for a while but lost patience. Good thing I did because it
allegedly has something like 2 million rooms.

------
mlillie
Not including the "Mystic" system seems like a huge oversight. It's an analog
game system that works using yes/no questions, 2D10, and a probability table.
It's not too elegant, but it works wonders. It can be used to assist the DM,
or as a full-on DM emulator.

~~~
dragonwriter
(1) It's called “Mythic”, not “Mystic”

(2) the Mythic Game Master Emulator actually leaves all of the details to
either the players or a human GM, it just provides directional guidance. It
would be interesting if you could use it to provide a framework around which
an AI could provide detailed descriptions, though.

------
echan00
This is a great article. I've been considering where this will head with gpt-2
dungeon master showing how far AI has come.

While I agree with the article that so far everything digital has been a noble
failure, I feel there is too much discussion between AI vs humans. I think the
future is in AI-assisted human DMs. Software may not be able to "entertain and
dazzle" with the creativity of humans but it can help coordinate many routine
tasks in any dnd game allowing the human DMs to focus their time on the
components that make the adventure fun.

~~~
matthewowen
Does it show how far AI has come? It produces a game that is fundamentally
unplayable, and because it's purely based on a model of language doesn't have
a very obvious path to improve, since there's no underlying model of the thing
it's trying to represent.

Are any of these applications of GPT-2 that attempt to use a pure language
representation as a way to sidestep modelling the underlying principles
actually successful? I feel like I've not actually seen any real successes.

~~~
britmob
AI Dungeon is _very_ playable if you are make an attempt to guide it in the
right direction. If you try to confuse it, though, you will very likely
succeed.

~~~
armitron
I agree if by "make an attempt to guide it in the right direction" you imply
"suspend disbelief and critical thinking, excuse/actively-imagine-away dumb
and nonsensical output and try to convince yourself that there is something
rather than nothing there".

In other words, AI dungeon is very playable if you delude yourself into a
state of continuous confirmation bias.

------
donpark
I think there are other forms of dungeon mastering that use little or no AI
while delivering the same if not better experience.

------
jmiskovic
Great article about a topic that has fascinated me for quite some time. Please
excuse the wall of text.

Procedural generation can provide unlimited amounts of content seeded from
finite effort. It's still mostly hand-crafted, just at different abstraction
level. Building blocks are constructed manually and algorithm that fits them
together is also carefully designed and fine tuned. It is used often in indie
games because of lower effort needed to give illusion of huge amount of
content. Meanwhile AAA companies can afford armies of level designers to make
a detailed words. I guess everyone agrees that human design beats procedural
and current AI. It is more varied, imaginative and purposeful - the 3
ingredients necessary for immersion. The crowd-sourced approach has not yet
been successfully applied, to best of my knowledge.

The work that GM is doing can be quite valuable, and yet it only reaches few
players of that campaign and is remembered vaguely. What if we could capture
and store GM responses to player prompts? What if other sessions could reuse
these responses and build on them to create new responses? The basic use of
recorded responses is to automate mundane actions and checks (fights,
lockpicking...) so that GM can focus on creative stories and arcs.

I've thought about this for quite some time and came up with partial solution.
The automatic response system could consist of rules that are hand-crafted by
GM while the session is played. Each rule is response to some action and
changes the world state. So, each rule has to store the name of action,
portion of world state that GM considers critical for that action, and how the
world state is affected by action.

For example, let's attack an orc with a sword. OK, the GM decides that
player's strength, sword sharpness, orc's agility and a dice role are
important in this interaction, so GM marks them as such. Because D20 dice came
out as 12, GM decides that attack was fairly successful, and changes orc's
state to severely injured. This interaction is saved and the gaming session
moves on. Later on, the same interaction 'attack with sword' is repeated by
with different world state. If important parts of world state are the
same/similar, then same result can be applied. If GM decides that existing
rule is not applicable, then differentiating world state is marked and
different results are entered and stored under a new rule. Now system is has
two rules for 'attack with sword' and can automatically choose between them,
based on which rule matches the world state the most. With time the system
becomes rich enough to simulate this action under various conditions, while
still being able to accommodate new situations with help from GM.

Such rule-based system can be visualized as bunch of simple state-charts that
are built on the fly, and they interact together by modifying global state. I
can imagine this simple mechanism would be good enough for combat mechanics,
crafting system, simple NPC simulation (moods, dialogs, quests), inventory
interaction, terrain manipulation... It should be enough to hand-craft a rich
immersive world?

The hard part is coming with data structure that can capture rich world state
in enough details without overwhelming the GM. The structure would have to
model locations with objects, each with its attributes. All this would have to
be relative to character who wants to preform the action. I'm considering
graph databases, but don't have enough experience with them to move onto
implementation :(

