I recently tried a game that generates NPC dialogue with an AI chatbot, and within minutes I was arguing with a hard-boiled cop about whether or not dragons are real. "Large language models" like ChatGPT are unpredictable, habitual bullshitters, which makes them funny, but not very good videogame characters. Hidden Door, a company founded by long-time AI developers, says it can do much better.
I didn't get to play Hidden Door's game, which is really a platform, but I spoke about it for an hour with founders Hilary Mason and Matt Brandwein at the Game Developer's Conference last month. What they say they have is a way to generate multiplayer text adventures set in existing fictional worlds—like Middle-earth, for example—that can respond to any player input and tell structured stories with surprises and payoffs that, unlike so many AI chatbot conversations, actually make sense.
