AIRPG: A New Kind of Game

AIRPG is an Artificially Intelligent Role Playing Game, effectively a Role Playing Games involving AI. Since AI definitionally needs a computer, all AIRPGs are Computer Role Playing Games (CRPGs), but not all CRPGs are AIRPGs. If you are interested in AIRPGS, it is likely that you have played a Role Playing Game before, in the context of the physical world, this was likely a Tabletop Role Playing Game (TTRPG), where Dungeons & Dragons is the most well-known, but far from the only option, or digitally one of the major CRPGs, such as Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher, Starfield, BioShock, Fallout to name but a few. TTRPGs are the original inspiration for CRPGs and while the CRPG has grown quite diverse, with many sub-genres within it, CRPGs remain bound by one fundamental element! They must revolve around a narrative, every CRPG has a story, and while main elements may vary across these games, including the level of player freedom in that narrative, they all revolve around a story.

Narrative is where AIRPGs begin to establish themselves as a new genre, AIRPGs use AI systems to dynamically generate the narrative. In non-AIRPGs, or effectively all preceding CRPGs at the time of writing, the narrative is static, set up in advance by the developers. A player can make choices, and those choices can have impact and change the story, but only in ways that the developers has designed and set in place before the content is shipped to the user. With AIRPGs, we begin to see a new kind of game, where players can make arbitrary choices in a way that would not have been possible in a CRPG, and only would have been possible in a TTRPG due to the presence of a human Game Master(GM) to immediately understand and respond to the player's choices. Conversations with Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are now truly conversations, not dialogue wheels/trees, and even more expansively events in the game world can be created dynamically based on player action rather than being pre-determined.

We are already seeing a variety of demos of AI NPCs, that are able to communicate with a player via text and/or voice in a conversational manner, however in all of these demos that we have seen, the NPCs are pre-programmed, the AI may be able to generate the exact text of the response, but their role and presence in the game were pre-determined by the developer. AI NPCs are certainly an element of AIRPGs, and we don't mean to imply that traditional CRPGs + AI NPCs are not AIRPGs, they are certainly the early first steps into the genre. However, AIRPGs are much more than this AIRPGs are game worlds that are developed by the AI in tandem with the user.

When we say worlds developed by the AI and the user in tandem, we mean everything. Much as a Game Master (GM) in a TTRPG context sits down with their players in a Session Zero - TTRPG jargon for a planning session before the actual gameplay begins - the AI can engage in a session zero with the user to identify the key elements of the game, and by key elements we mean anything that could be discussed: rules, game physics, places, characters, story elements, items, tropes, technology/magic level and anything else that may come to mind. This session zero discussion can be as shallow or detailed as the user desires, with the AI inferring and assuming any missing details to complete the game world construction. From the information provided by the user, the AI can initiate the generation of a playable world for the user. This game-world will be highly customized as it has been created specifically for the user based on their expressed (or we could imagine learned) preferences. Thus every NPC, item, quest, etc. is created by the AI rather than the developer. These games can range from text-only like the classic Interactive Fiction (IF) RPGs of the early computers to modern style fully rendered worlds, where assets are selected or generated and placed into the world by the AI. This changes the game development paradigm dramatically and allows for both personalization and scale that was previously infeasible.

While we have highlighted, how AIRPGs can become completely AI generated, the genre will always include a spectrum of games from very strictly pre-structured with AI NPCs/dialogue, to developer-defined worlds and structures with AI developments, to completely AI-established worlds. Each of these flavours of the genre will have its own unique advantages and disadvantages, and likely its own incredible games, AIRPGs do not spell an end to human game masters or game developers, but rather a new kind of game making use of AI as a part of the game development and gameplay process. Games have continually evolved with technology, from text/choose-your-own-adventure games in the Interactive Fiction (IF) genre and isometric CRPGs to the adoption of 3D graphics, consoles, and handhelds. Technological advancements have continued to change the bounds of what is possible in game, from more realistic and engaging graphics, creative and updated UI, large and more expansive game worlds both physically (in their virtual space) and narratively in the amount of playable content and agency that can be found within these worlds. AIRPGs will allow for a scaling in both narrative scale and freedom and world size, we are likely to see faster impact on narrative scale than the virtual world based on current developments, but are certainly coming and will allow for a new kind of game on scale that was previously not possible.

We expect to see a wide range of games in the genre from those that inspire to be as personalized as possible and generate directly in response to a user's preferences and input, to those that are carefully crafted by writers and developers to tell a story that players will be eager to experience and explore. Traditional development will certainly still remain relevant and we expect many games to still tell stories chosen by a creator, but that creator will now be able to rely on the AI to fill in details that they otherwise may not have the time or resources to attend, by establishing things like a broad genre and rich history for a world its magic/technology as well as aesthetics, color pallets, and narrative tropes will be known by the AI as such writers and developers can pass these parameters into the AI to create new regions in their game world or make their narrative story more responsive to user actions.

We believe that players that enjoy narrative driven gameplay and increased agency will be especially drawn to the new AIRPG genre, and we are deeply excited to see how the genre evolves!

We are also excited to be presenting our own entry into the genre through the AIRPG-HUB, our platform for fully user & AI driven game world creation and gameplay. Today, our initial offering is a text-only experience, much as the original Role Playing Games, and we consider our game to be a descendant of the Interactive Fiction (IF), TTRPGs, and CRPGs genres.