On my first failed foray into the world of post-Bachelor’s academia, one of the central themes in the education department was the concept of ‘new media’. This would have taken place during the initial thrust of the belief that iPads for every student would accelerate and propel education into a new millennium; grappling with this concept was a new paradigm in attempting to address inherent differences and permutations of students’ pedagogical needs. Most of the idea surrounded migrating the base assumptions of literacy into literacies of varying types given the shifting and dynamic nature of new technologies – along with recognizing that the cultural/memetic landscape was moving and evolving faster and creating more niches for self expression and actualization, and that all of these had to be taken into account in modern classrooms.

There were inherent contradictions in the methods teachers were forced into implementing by precedent and law, but there were good points being made about the nature of the shifting landscape of media and interaction in my classes. Video games are a great example of this: the medium being interactive means that the negotiation of meaning and literacy becomes a two way road where authorship and knowledge are collaborative concepts.

This collaboration becomes all the more relevant with the development and adoption of large language models. There have been a few instances of games being developed that utilize this newborn technology, but they have been closer to test benches with a fancy façade wacked on top rather than serious attempts to weave meaningful and complex experiences from this technology.

A thought has been bouncing around my brain: interactive fiction has everything to gain from this revolution. One of the biggest advantages of these large language models is their power when structure is applied that guides their voice. This structure – something every game designer and programmer and story writer is familiar with – could provide the possibility for incredibly dynamic depth, just by writing the edges of a given game world and shaping the direction of its products to point it at really interesting targets, while keeping things fuzzy enough to allow for truly unique stories and experiences for each playthrough.

I started looking into some interesting systems that could be dropped on top of a large-language-model-core that could provide rich experiences. Here are a few ideas:

Psychological Anthropomorphization

Inspired by Disco Elysium, this system essentially takes a modified version of the Myers-Briggs/Jungian Personality Dynamics and transforms the different cognitive functions into anthropomorphized characters that pipe up throughout your journey to advise and aid or ail you.

Politics/Management Simulation

After doing light reading on organizational dynamics, I was interested in tinkering with ways to develop worlds modeled after different historical semi-stable government structures: monarchy, constitutional monarchy, feudal societies, etc. – along with the cultural values accompanying each. What would be fascinating would be to have a set of generation steps develop a new world from the outputs of a large language model. The idea behind this portion of the system would be to spend time generating at least a set of characters along with their inter-relatedness in organizational structures to provide a basis for interesting storylines to develop.

More ideas are coming, but there’s an absolutely vital project all of this development depends on: a GUI-based prompt-generation and testing program that would save prompts that would have dynamically-fillable portions to consistently be able to query these models for information or decisions. Such a program would essentially save these prompts, have the potential to develop massive tests of on them to see their success and viability with different underlying parameters and in a variety of circumstances, and then potentially develop chains of these pre-arranged prompts to keep the world creation and world simulation humming along.

Have yet to develop this though – it’s on the list.