Comment by mlyle
4 days ago
His example:
Rimworld is a great universe where we think about characters' stories, and there's really just like, a couple dozen attributes and straightforward ways they interact with the game.
An LLM context window could easily have 20 times as much interpersonal state, and make it interact in much more unexpected (but plausible) ways. That's going to be a surprising and rewarding gaming experience once someone figures it out.
Context window is arbitrary and can be adjusted on demand. When a new random event needs to be generated, and then fleshed out, the context can contain e.g. list of facts about the story so far, the overall story arc, summary of main characters or plot threads. This can be used by LLM to decide e.g. which faction will attack, and who will be on it, and what their goal will be, etc. After the event concludes, it just becomes another line in story event history. Meanwhile, that can be fed to a differently prompted LLM to evolve the plot arc, update motivations of background characters, etc.
I have a feeling people imagine LLMs as end-to-end DMs that should somehow remember everything and do everything in one inference round. That's not what they are. They're building blocks. They're to be chained and mixed with classical flow control, algorithms, and data storage (as well as the whole interactive game mechanics, in videogame context).
Maybe. But for something like Rimworld++++, you don't need all that sophistication. You need a pile of relevant facts and a clear task to determine something about the game or write some text for the user. Sure, curating and retrieving selectively would probably be even better and more flexible.