Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO in Second Life -- think a text-driven GTA Online, but both more creative and adult-rated -- just added AI interaction to its roleplay gaming systems. If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the first live MMOs to integrate LLMs like ChatGPT into gameplay. (It might actually be the very first!)
The AI for Crack Den roleplay comes in several flavors: The Story HUD for giving out quests, Live Character Cards for NPCs, AI-generated dialog from NPCs, and for querying Crack Den's massive story canon and rules database. To do that, lead developer Nadir Taov is leveraging multiple LLMs:
"If it’s answering questions or generating summaries that can be vanilla, it’s GPT 4o. [See above -WJA] If it’s story-related, I switch to more unrestricted models that are tuned for roleplay too. At least three different models in play: MythoMax and LLama3 so far … new models seem to be popping up every few months and each require special ways to structure prompts so I’m exploring when I can. I’m trying to see if how agnostic I can get to the models though."
Linden Lab recently experimented with LLM-powered NPCs in a test area, but Crack Den is a thriving and highly active roleplay game. First launched in 2006 as a rickety RPG where stories and quests were conveyed by in-world notecards, the core player base has remained, evolved, and grown together. To this day (by Nadir’s estimate) some 5,000 SLers visit the mini-world of Crack Den every month, perhaps to participate in the mayhem, or to gawk like post-apocalyptic tourists and the desperately seedy goings-on.
Launched last weekend, Nadir tells me the community reception has been pretty good -- and even helped bring in some new players:
Excited to finally unveil the next chapter of story-making and #roleplay in @SecondLife… the all-new Story HUD 3 is available in the @CrackDen now featuring Narrator ✨ #AI that powers quests, answers, player-matching, and more to take immersion in the #metaverse to a whole new… pic.twitter.com/GjRydO0hw2
— Nadir Taov (@Taov) July 7, 2024
"Generally positive feedback on the application of Gen AI in areas like generating daily 'live character cards' - some tuning to be done based on what I'm hearing," as Nadir puts it. "Also, in just a week, it generated 900 encounters (matching players with a little narrative/quest) ... of those, 160 were completed which means those are brand new players on sim who were engaged by players who otherwise likely wouldn't have.
"The intention of these features are to spark opportunities for players to connect and roleplay, which it's doing. Definitely more monitoring and tuning to do, but I'm now crafting more encounter types, like between police officers and citizens who don't have a lot of criminal activity -- so in this example, police officers will be prompted when they're in proximity of a player with little to no recent crime and incentivize them to issue them a citation or harass them for something."
The NPC dialog is a bit difficult to read in this demo video, but should give you a basic idea of gameplay:
"NPCs are obvious when you see them in world," Nadir tells me. "They are animesh objects with subtle animations and a titles indicating them as so (see video). Roleplay with them is calculated different than with a live player -- ultimately it’s all about writing stories with others and NPCs can provide specialized knowledge and/or just a novel experience of writing 1-1 with AI. I’m working on making the responses as human like as possible (response latency, memory of previous exchanges, even connecting stories between other NPCs like they talk to each other, etc )"
See Nadir's Twitter/X thread for more, and explore Crack Den here. I'm writing a much longer feature on this impressive roleplay community (coming soon), but as with many things, the addition of AI to such a long-running MMO is the kind of innovation that Second Life creators still excel at. While many AAA game developers are talking about doing this on a much larger scale, I strongly suggest they check out its actual application by people like Nadir and the players of Crack Den.
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