If you want to meet the latest in AI-powered NPCs, there's a sassy Southern sorority girl in Hathian you can chat with today: Click here to teleport to them.
It's the latest in NPCs denizens of Crack Den, the long-running mini-MMO in Second Life. (Read my free Patreon story on Crack Den here.) Created by Alterscape Studio, lead developer Nadir Taov added basic NPC-driven gen AI tech to the MMO in July.
The new update this month, NPC Companions, is much more ambitious:
"These aren’t just static characters," Nadir tells me. "They have distinct personalities and access to specific knowledge. For example, a police NPC can pull from the criminal reports maintained by players, while a nurse NPC can reference medical charts submitted by players." He's expanding the roster of these NPCs to 20 characters this weekend.
And he really means "Companion" NPCs:
"They now have both short-term and long-term memory, retaining details from their interactions with players. These NPCs track relationship status, moving from stranger to close friend, based on how players interact with them over time. Attributes like kindness or hostility matter, shaping evolving relationships over time." Nadir tells me they can even recognize continually cruel behavior, and may exact West World-type revenge on their bullies.
And as I just discovered, they even interact with you when you physically bump into them:
When I fumble-fingeredly crashed into Cassie (above) she generated this response in text chat:
Cassie's piercing blue eyes widen as Hamlet collides into her, but she quickly composes herself. "Well, hello there sugar," she drawls, her voice smooth as honey despite the interruption. "Watch your step now, I wouldn't want you ruining my outfit." She takes a step back, her heels clicking on the pavilion floor. The balloons above her head bob and weave in the humid air as if echoing her movements.
These interactions are currently generated by six different models, says Nadir, "including variants of Llama 2/3 and OpenAI, depending on the task at hand".
Notably, Nadir isn't creating these Companions as ends in themselves:
"My ultimate goal with AI is to create experiences that encourage players to connect with each other," as he puts it. "Even when interacting with an NPC, the system is designed to guide players toward real human connections by highlighting active spaces or upcoming events in the sim."
That's an important design point: Many AI evangelists assume gamers will happily interact with NPCs for hours, but the simple reality is we'll always yearn to mainly engage with other actual humans.
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In my experience, across many years of gaming and running gaming servers, the surefire sign that your platform or server is dying - is when people start filling their player numbers with bots.
"AI characters" is just a euphemism for "bot" and "We're dying". Bots were fun in the short term, a small spike of players happens out of interest, but then a much larger canyon dip as a result. Bots and AFK people in a chatroom only works to draw people for so long... Adding a chat ability to a bot will buy little time.
If want players to connect to each other, I want to make sure they can find each other. That means updated and honest concurrency numbers, not using 'traffic' as a deceptive substitute for "Who is present here", providing easy access to top worlds, a searchable "Codex" of worlds, and accurate numbers of who is present in each.
Posted by: WeWantToMeetPeopleNotBots | Saturday, September 21, 2024 at 08:30 AM