Playing in a new world

ME: I would like you to pretend to be a text adventure game in the isekai genre. Please describe my environment in English and offer three choices of action for my character at the end of each reply that highlights a word in Japanese as a way for me to learn new vocabulary.

ChatGPT: You find yourself in a lush, green field. The sun is shining and birds are chirping in the distance. You notice a small village in the distance. In front of you is a sign written in Japanese. It says “村” (mur-a) which means “village.”

1. Walk towards the village
2. Explore the field
3. Return to the place where you appeared

The more I play with ChatGPT, the more I feel like I’ve wandered into a new world. It feels like I’m discovering new possibilities each time I log in.

Essentially, my prompts are just a set of affordances and constraints that I define. But the cool thing is how easily ChatGPT adjusts. At one point it tells me that a stand in a market is selling “kanji” and I say that’s a strange thing to sell. It agrees and changes the option to educational material.

At another point in my game I ignore the options and tell it I want to visit the adventurer’s guild so I can sign up as a new adventurer. It adjusts seamlessly and gives me the new set of options.

This reminds me so much of how I used to play games as a child, making up the rules as I went along. My brother and I had a set of encyclopedias and for a while we would look up the names of Greek gods and pretend to have the powers listed there. Poseidon had his trident and a chariot pulled by dolphins. My brother would counter with the weapons and powers he had at hand.

This is just the start. The models will get better. People will think of better prompts. They’ll start to integrate generative images and video. And… honestly, I can’t imagine what will be possible in 20 years.