Infinity Arcade
Play any game you can think of as a text adventure, with a language model as the game engine.
Infinity Arcade started with a question to my 11-year-old nephew: do you want to make a game? In seconds we were playing Link and Mario against Bowser in ChatGPT, with hit points draining and spells being cast. A good enough language model could be the game engine.
I built Infinity Arcade in April 2023 to try that with any game. You describe an idea, and a model writes the title, genre, description and tagline, plus a prompt for the cover art. Then it plays the game with you one turn at a time: a short scene, four choices, and whatever state the story needs to keep track of.
The trade-offs showed up early. GPT-4 ran the best games but was slow and rationed; GPT-3.5 was fast but sometimes made up the game state; and the closed models refused some game moves, like gambling the company’s money on crypto. I wrote it up in Infinity Arcade and Sparks of Generative Video Games.
