How AI Is Being Used to Create the Ultimate Choose Your Own Adventure Game

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"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."

Will you open the mailbox, or head for the house? The choice was yours in the opening scenario of Zork, a 1977 text-based adventure game that's one of the most famous examples of the genre.

Choices are at the foundation of the text-based games. However, there are usually only a few possible paths to take based on how the creator has written the scenario. But what if your choice was truly limitless, because the story hadn't been written yet?

That's the power of AI-generated text-based RPGs, a growing fad that's become even more popular in recent months thanks to the rise of ChatGPT and GPT-4.

"I ran into this band of goblins," recounts Nick Walton, the creator of the RPG generator called AI Dungeon. "In a normal game you might need to fight and defeat them to get their loot, but instead I decided to befriend them and teach them how to play instruments. We ended up forming a band and performed in festivals around the country promoting human-orc equality… It was such a fun example of the way that in normal games we have the illusion of choice, but in reality have very little choice in what kind of hero we want to be and where we want the story to go and AI has the power to let us do things in a new, really fun way."

Text adventures rose to prominence in the same decade that home console video games were just starting to spread their wings on Atari. Players read the scenario, make choices, and imagine they're going on the adventure that the story