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Triggering Neuroplasticity for Enhancing Musical Talent: A study on Monkey and Human behavior after Exposure to Videogames and Visual/Auditory Stimuli to Increase Musical Abilities through Neuroplasticity

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The light side of gaming: creativity and brain plasticity

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The light side of gaming: creativity and brain plasticity

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Abstract: "Could gaming enhance brain plasticity and executive functions (EFs) by fostering creativity?We identify vital benefits from further research exploring the relationship between games, brain plasticity, and creativity. The ongoing progress in neuroscience research in these three fields offers many possibilities and prospects for impactful therapy. Therefore, we emphasize the significance of investigating the untapped potentials of using games in creative therapy—our perspective on the often-overlooked neuroscientific aspect of creativity concerning health and well-being. One of these potentials is examining games as a therapeutic tool, focusing on their capacity to inspire and engage the imagination and other mental operators shared with creativity. Thus, using a game as a therapeutic approach may boost brain plasticity, which may help them reduce their cognitive impairments by improving their EFs. This review offers a comprehensive outline of the latest advancements in the literature on games that tie them to creativity through enhancing brain plasticity and EFs. Communicating this knowledge can furnish countless possibilities to improve our overall health and well-being and foster a positive perspective in individuals affected by anxiety."

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What is FLOW THEORY in game design? - The Basics - (Part 1)

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What is FLOW THEORY in game design? - The Basics - (Part 1)

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"An in depth look at the basics of Flow Theory in Game Design. We walk through the progression of getting a player into and keeping them in a flow state. Flow graphs are discussed in detail and the idea of Anxiety and Boredom in relation to challenge are covered.

Flow theory is a psychology theory that we can adapt in our game designs to create challenges that are catered to the skill level of our players. It is a fundamental theory that every game developer should have a good grasp on.

The idea of flow theory is to give a challenge to a player that is equal or slightly more difficult that the level of the players current skill. This will put the player into a flow state which is a state of heightened awareness. If we choose a challenge or task that is too easy, the player will fall into boredom and may abandon our games. If the challenge is too hard and the player's skill isn't developed enough, the player will fall into anxiety where they cannot overcome the challenge. This will make them frustrated, angry or fed up and they may leave."

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What is FLOW THEORY in game design? - The Basics - (Part 1)

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Discussing examples of successful flow in video game case studies, and highlighting how different elements contribute to it.

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In the 1970s a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi experimentally evaluated the flow. He found's that a person's skill and the difficulty of a task interact with a result of cognitive and emotional states.

In resume, Csikszentmihalyi looks at what makes us find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities.

source: ted.com

The flow is a mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. It is a state and a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of an activity.

In game design, the flow is an important factor to take in consideration if you want to create player engagement. Here is the list of elements that can influence and affect the flows in video games.

The player controls the situation and the activity: The player feels that he can successfully beat the challenge. The objective for him seems reachable.

PINBALL IS A GREAT EXAMPLE OF FLOW

PINBALL, (I know, I'm old) is a great example of flow. I am a huge fan of pinball. It is one of my ex-colleague that give me that example and I have to agree with him. all the elements needed to create the flow state of mind to the player is in the design of a pinball. Let.s take a look at the video and try to identify the elements listed above in the video sequence.

Source: Plunder Pinball YouTube

All the functionality needed to create the flow are present in pinball design

All the elements are in place to create the flow and give pleasure to the player. Is it the same for your game?

PUT THE PLAYER IN THE "ZONE"

As a game developer, your goal is to master the elements and feature that you have in your hands to create the player flow state of mind. If you succeed to put your players in the "zone" you will gain; More engage players, you will retain them and out of it, you will obtain a better monetization from them.

At the end of the day, having a strong flow can make the player perceive your game as a better quality game than it is in reality.

You should consider that each design decision may impact your game potential to put and keep the player in the flow.

There are 2 types of flow to applied in your game design; The and the

The microflow is equal to a game session, if you are in AAA type of game, the microflow can be up to 15 minutes. If you are working on free to play in a mobile game, the microflow that you should aim should be around 3-4 minutes.

The macroflow is equal to the duration of the entire game. For Free to play game or GAAS, where you aimed to retain players for years and not hours, the macroflow can be equal to the player long term goal or objectives.

The microflow can be defined as an intense and focus state of mind where the player feels the enjoyment and fulfillment, this is often generated by a series of successful achievements.

HOW TO BUILD THE MICROFLOW

There are 3 important means that you can integrate into your game design to help you create the microflow for your game.

The gameplay rhythm and the player inputs are related to a temp and a rhythmic pattern.

Design the player inputs combination as a rhythmic pattern is part of work to create the microflow. If there is no real define pattern in the player input experience, it will be harder for your game to create the micro flow effect for the player.

Unconsciously, you will help the player to get naturally into a sequence and mood of inputs. You will create a pattern that will be recorded by the player brains and make him feel good and even better than it supposed to. This trick can even start dopamine secretion in player brains.

As the video below shows, some games are directly designed based on the rhythmic pattern input.

Source: threecomedrycorner YouTube

THE VIRTUOUS CIRCLE EFFECT

Another mechanic type that you should consider for creating the microflow is creating the virtuous effect. You game should have or add gameplay mechanic that will encourage and promote the player series of success.

This mechanic will help the player to be and to stay in the microflow. As long as the player succeeds and stays in the flow, the challenge will become easier and stays easier.

Guitar hero virtuous circle example

Source: StarSlay3R YouTube

In guitar hero, the tolerance of the input increase as the player gets a series of success. This helps the player to be maintained in the flow and keep him engaged. He got the perception that he is better than expected and this hook him to keep playing.

Schematic of the virtuous circle effect in video games

In resume, to create the virtuous circle effect, your game system must have gameplay mechanics that increase the tolerance parameter define by the game to help maintain the player in the microflow.

POSITIVE FEEDBACKS AND REWARDS

The more the player succeeds in doing a specific action, the more the game should give him positive feedbacks to help to maintain him in the flow. In Candy Crush, the sugar crush sequence gives many rewards and chaining success based on the player performance. The more the player succeed to complete the puzzle in less move will make the sugar crush sequence more and more rewarding. Even so, if the level is complete, the game maintains the player in the microflow and keep him still wanting to play.

Source: ProVid_games YouTube

In BURNOUT PARADISE, the player is in the micro flow chaining success, the games give him positive feedbacks to do so through UI and sounds. The game system gives to the player bonuses to keep doing the action of avoiding collisions helping the player to stay in the microflow.

Source: Gurkentier game youtube

These feedbacks are an intrinsic and positive reinforcement to keep the player engaged.

The macro flow is adapting the challenge difficulty to the player skills progression and motivation through the game. The macro flow can be easily compared to the difficulty curve of the game.

The goal of the macro flow is to maintain the player in the zone between anxiety and boredom. For a game designer point of view, it means managing;

Those are all elements that are needed to help maintain the player in the macroflow.

If the player skills are too high for the challenge, the player may risk falling in a boredom state of mind meaning that the game won't satisfy is needs and they is a big chance that this user will churn and stop playing the game.

On the other hand, if the game is too hard, the player may risk falling in an anxiety state of mind meaning and may also churn because he felt that the challenge is too hard for him.

The challenge must follow and follow with the player's skills. The evolution of the challenge is tricky, is the primary goal is to maintain the player in the flow zone, between boredom and anxiety. If you succeed to maintain the player in the flow zone, he will not see the time passes, be hooked in your game and live a great experience.

BEWARE OF THE "PLAYTEST EFFECT"

More than often, video game company do playtest in order to find the right balance between the challenge and the player skills. Our goal is to find the right balance to bring more people playing the game.

The real problem is that most of the time, by listening to much the playtest result, we deliberately decrease the challenge believing that this will make the game more accessible to more players.

In fact, what we are doing here is that we are increasing the potential boredom zone in our game. We deliberately create a boring game experience to more user believing that our flow zone will be bigger for more players but in fact, we don't retain user because the game is not enough challenging for some of them.

I am not saying that everybody does the same mistake, I am just saying that lowering the challenge is not the best solution to apply to your game. In fact, this is exactly where dynamic game design become the most powerful tool that you can have in your pocket to prevent that to happen. This will be a great upcoming article.

Follow my blog at: www.thinkgamedesign.com or follow me on facebook thinkgamedesign

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In this post, I will explain what is the flow theory and how can we applied it while designing a video game.

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Review on the Prevalence and Persistence of Neuromyths in Education – Where We Stand and What Is Still Needed

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Review on the Prevalence and Persistence of Neuromyths in Education – Where We Stand and What Is Still Needed

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Frontiers | Review on the Prevalence and Persistence of Neuromyths in Education – Where We Stand and What Is Still Needed

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The buzzword brain-based learning emerged in the 1970s and continues to fascinate teachers and learners in schools and universities today. However, what inte…

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No, you do not, in fact, use just 10% of your brain, and "learning styles" make no difference in the classroom. Psychology professor Christopher Chabris discusses these and other "neuromyths" with WSJ's Gary Rosen. Photo: Jenny Elia Pfeiffer/Corbis.

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"Your brain uses lots of different pathways to communicate – which form complex networks in your brain. Creativity depends on the cooperation of two competing networks: one that generates spontaneous thoughts (the default mode network) and the executive control center of the brain that governs everything else. Our random, free-flowing thoughts that are worthy of further exploration pop into our consciousness when they're recruited by the executive control network."

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The light side of gaming: creativity and brain plasticity

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The light side of gaming: creativity and brain plasticity

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"As for the impact on creativity, studies have shown a positive correlation between video game playing and creativity. For instance, a study of nearly 500 12-year-olds revealed that the more children played video games, the more creative they were in drawing pictures and writing stories (Jackson et al., 2012)."

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Computer gaming alters resting-state brain networks, enhancing cognitive and fluid intelligence in players: evidence from brain imaging-derived phenotypes-wide Mendelian randomization

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Computer gaming alters resting-state brain networks, enhancing cognitive and fluid intelligence in players: evidence from brain imaging-derived phenotypes-wide Mendelian randomization

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Although the brain can potentially leave the frontal lobe less formed in gamers than non-gamers, it can help in other functions of the brain, like focusing or problem-solving.

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What Being Neurodivergent Means in Game Development

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What Being Neurodivergent Means in Game Development

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What Being Neurodivergent Means in Game Development

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Neurodivergent young people and online games

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Neurodivergent young people and online games

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Neurodivergent young people and online games

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Supported by Roblox, this research aims to better understand the benefits and challenges of online gaming on neurodivergent young people.

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The McKendree Review - McKendree University's Student-Run Newspaper

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Video Game Music Will Help You Study - The McKendree Review

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As college students, it feels like there is always something to study for. For those who like to listen to music when they study, this is for you!

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In between all my other activities, I consider myself to be a somewhat avid gamer. I've been gaming since I was 10 years old and, to this day, I own a PlayStation 4 and a Nintendo Switch. Not only do these consoles get a lot of activity as media platforms, but I also have dozens of games that I frequent somewhat regularly.

This shouldn't be something unusual to admit in our modern world. But unfortunately, gaming is one of those leisurely activities that have a bit of a perceived stigma to it. It's usually portrayed by the mainstream as an activity suitable only for the unsociable, i.e. the overweight, geeky individual, alone in the dark in front of a television. We often associate gamers with negative stereotypes, and gaming is often considered their only defining feature. Worse than all this, games themselves are often seen as a complete and utter waste of time: they either have nothing to offer, or side effects ranging from the harmful to the violent. Many are often ashamed to be associated with gaming, more so than any other hobbies, and it's not often seen as an acceptable one, especially among older demographics. In short, if you are over the age of 25 and still play games regularly, it's seen as sad and pitiable.

But thankfully, in the advent of the new millennium, those views and stigmas are being challenged and slowly disappearing. Video games are losing their status as a niche interest and becoming more accepted as a general form of entertainment. They have also come a long way in terms of technology and, in the process, become one of our strongest tools as a social, educational, and recreational resource. No other medium (books, movies, music, and so on.) gives you such an interactively visual experience as video games and the potential for its use to change lives cannot be overstated.

Now, I'm not going to go through and tackle the stigmas or many of the specific ways gaming has grown and improved people's lives despite these negative viewpoints. Other online sources out there can and have tackled these topics better than I ever could (check out some resources at the bottom of this article). However, I wanted to discuss the connection between two topics you might not have even thought about or considered before: mindfulness/meditation and video games.

On the surface, these two don't seem to have anything in common, and it's, at first glance, a frankly ridiculous idea. How can you possibly find any semblance of mindfulness and a meditative state from playing something considered as trivial as a video game? As it turns out, there are several different ways, many of which you might not expect.

The Flow State and Immersion

Gaming is a very engrossing activity. As many players will attest after they've been going for a long time, gaming can serve as a way to get you into what's called a 'flow state,' a deep and immersive awareness that affects you in all ways. This state of flow has been touched on and discussed quite considerably in the field of psychology, most notably by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience."But, put very simply, this state is a conscientious feeling where nothing else matters in the moment, and you are motivated to continue on and exist in what you are doing, simply because it makes you happy. Time seems to vanish, distractions all but disappear, and you are present in what you are doing. This can apply to many different types of activities, such as working out and training in particular, but it is very strong in gamers-especially those prevalent in specific game genres or who participate in various e-sports.

This state of immersion allows you to become not only more present and aware of your current moment, but also motivates you to keep pushing and find that next step. We want to keep going and practicing so we can not only find the next achievement, but better ourselves in the process. This is something that I feel a lot of us who get frustrated with meditation miss right off the bat.At first, we can be under the impression that it is an instant problem-solver of life's hardships and something that we are immediately good at. The image we get is that of a big red button where, once we push it, life instantly becomes better, and that it offers you peace instantaneously.

On the contrary, however, being mindful is not an easy state to live in and not one that we are immediately good at. Like anything, it has to be built up and experienced firsthand and can definitely be challenging at first. But as you build regular experience withholding judgment on yourself no matter what happens, it's a state that can quickly become enjoyable and often times effortless. This feeling of bringing you into the zone is something that well-made games tend to have in spades, and bad games tend to lack. The right game can drop you into the shoes of another character, bring you into another world, or just cool down your emotions after a long and hard day. They can allow you to mindfully tune out and be refreshed enough to tackle real-life again.

But what about instances where games can stress us and rage us (i.e. the gamer rage mode)? This is again where mindfulness can come in. If we take time to recognize the harmful state that we are being brought to, we can stop ourselves and calm down. This awareness is absolutely necessary and prevents many a controller being thrown at a screen and many TVs being saved. A mindful gamer has much stronger experiences because they're in the moment enjoying themselves, recognizing problems, accepting them, and letting them go. In this way, games can exist as a mindful and meditative practice in and of themselves, provided we tackle them with the right mindset.

Now that's not to say that every game taps into mindfulness as a goal or that this state even really comes close to a traditional mindful meditation practice. But the potential is there, and many more games in recent years have been starting to actively tap directly into that. While there aren't many games out there that actively include meditation, some of them are still described as mindful or meditative in experience and tone. These games are usually slower-paced, often smaller in scope, and actively try to connect you with specific emotions related to their content. Oftentimes, they explore bigger themes than games usually tackle or have a core mechanic that gets you to think in very specific ways.

To that end, I wanted to provide you with a list of some of my favorite games, which I highly recommend trying for mindfulness and meditation. Some of them are AAA titles while others are more indie in nature, but all of them have some meditative element to them that's worth recognizing and exploring.

8 Games to Practice Mindfulness

This is easily the most popular game on this list and the one that you've most likely heard of. It's true that 'Skyrim' is all about adventuring through and saving a fantasy world from the scourge of angry dragons. But at the same time, you'd be surprised at how much of it allows for simple breathing and mindful reflection, particularly in the landscape traversal and in some of the more simple tasks of the game. Thich Naht Hanh specifically talks about mindfulness in the idea of the mundane in his book "Peace Is Every Step" using washing the dishes as an example; the same principle can be applied here. The small activity of smelting some iron, mining ore, or exploring the forests and mountains in the smaller moments between the gigantic action pieces can be incredibly grounding and experienced as a way to breathe and come back to our awareness.

There's a moment in particular as the player proceeds up a long set of steps towards the top of a mountain, where we notice several individuals along the road meditating on the meaning of the emblems, quotes, and totems situated at various points along the path. We can choose to interact with, simply glance at, or even ignore each one as we make our way up. But their presence along this path brings a beautiful reminder of the value of being with yourself and taking a moment to pause amidst the gorgeous beauty of the landscape around you. It's easily one of my favorite moments in the game, if not in gaming altogether.

This is a game I wish I had the time and energy to get into because I've heard it's an absolutely stellar piece of work with so much to do and get into. It's very similar to Skyrim in terms of large open-world RPG fair. However, the main character of Geralt has the ability to meditate in game. It works as a mechanic of sorts in that it allows time to pass within the setting, allows for some gorgeous visual imagery, and, on the lower difficulty settings, replenishes your health and potions. It serves as a healing practice of sorts that is honestly brilliantly handled.

It's a beautiful mechanical exemplification of what meditation and mindfulness can do within a game itself. The game's developers and programmers thought to add this in as a core mechanic, which tells me they must've realized the importance of what a practice can do for us in healing and connecting us back to ourselves.

Both of these games feel very similar to me, and so I placed them together. While both work with widely different aesthetics, styles, and stories, the tone and feel of what they are trying to accomplish feel very similar, and they both thrive on the concept of immersion. They also provoke an intense sense of mindfulness and awareness through their respective runtime, with an artistic sense of wonder that makes both feel like an experience rather than a game. I always recommend both of these titles to people who want to know what I mean when I say games deserve more respect than they are often given credit for. I've seen "Journey" in particular bring people to tears with its beauty and tone, and it remains my favorite one on this list as a beautiful representation of the hero's journey. But I love "Abzu" too for its underwater worlds and for making meditation statues an actual collectible in the game. Both are relatively short and only take a couple of hours to play, but they are well worth the time in seeing how awareness and mindfulness can work in a unique game setting as well as for how gorgeous and ground-breaking both of them are.

"Minecraft" is one of those games I can personally never get into but I can very much see the appeal of. Its explosion in popularity with children comes from its simple mechanics and gigantic toybox-like setting where anything is possible. It's also wonderful from a mindfulness perspective in that it forces you to develop a core set of tools and keep a constant awareness of your surroundings. Anything, and I mean ANYTHING, can be of use to you in this game in a similar way to how mindfulness and meditation can be used to improve any given situation. And it really forces you to live in the moment. One second you could be calmly building a structure or chopping some wood, and the next you are fighting exploding monsters or even other players. It makes you accept the reality of how things work and causes you to adapt and cope with whatever it throws at you. I love how much this game is being used in the classroom as a learning tool; many core concepts of psychology, meditation, and philosophy are also embedded beautifully in its very design.

This is one of those weird Indie games that ends up saying a lot more than it really has any right to. Not only does the minimalist gameplay of "Night in the Woods" emphasize quiet movement and simple dialogue interactions as its core, but it also addresses many complicated issues like mental health, sexuality, poverty, and difficulties in a serious and complicated manner. It really forces you to be present with each character in their struggles and, for the right person, it can really reflect and resonate with them. Many players have seriously been affected and directly inspired by it because it connected to and allowed them to handle their own issues in a virtual world. At the same time, it's not entirely bleak about what it talks about, and the fact that it's centered on a fictional town of talking animals in Oregon allows you to be comfortable in exploring them. By the end of the game, "Night in the Woods" has allowed you to find the hope in fictional settings and situations so you can connect with and maybe find hope for your own.

Another pair that come from the company that made "Journey", "flOw" and "Flower" are simple games that touch on the beauty of life in all of its stages, albeit in different forms. "flOw" takes a more abstract and minimalistic look at evolution and incorporates some of Csikszentmihalyi's very concepts into its core design. "Flower" allows you to feel the beauty of nature and breath while flowing with petals in the wind. While they are very separate in practical terms, they are also oddly similar in spirit and in message; both carry an utterly profound and mindful experience with their shorter running times. These are another pair accessible to absolutely anyone and perfect for a stress-free and relaxing meditation on screen.

"No Man's Sky" is a difficult one to discuss in that, upon initial release, I personally was very underwhelmed by it. But over time, as more content came out and I played it a little more, I came to realize that it does represent the concept of mindful exploration beautifully-in a way I've yet to see many other games do. While the core of the game is considerably lacking in places, the size and scope of the universe you are travelling in is simply vast and requires your mind to not only focus but to take each step with slow and methodical care. This is not a game for fast-paced action but, rather, a calm exploration of other worlds. It invites the player to thoughtfully take into consideration the ways she will need to survive and thrive in the various places they explore. It provides endless opportunities to explore, learn, and grow and that itself is a powerful meditative experience that just so happens to be in another galaxy.

This little app gets an honorable mention because it's the closest thing I've seen in a game that makes meditation a part of its core functionality. It's a small $2 game that uses a swirling ball on your phone that you have to keep moving with your finger. The intention here is to release stress-reducing chemicals and hormones in your brain and calm you down. It's a brilliant app that brings mindfulness to the average phone user in a way that I've yet to see other mainstream apps do. I highly recommend checking it out.

Hopefully, my recommendations and thoughts bring to light something new for you in regards to either topic. Are there any other ones out there that come to mind? Leave them in the comments below!

Enjoyed reading this article? Consider supporting us on Patreon or making a one-time donation. As little as $2 will allow us to publish many more amazing articles about yoga and mindfulness.

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8 Video Games to Practice Mindfulness - Shut Up & Yoga

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In between all my other activities, I consider myself to be a somewhat avid gamer. I've been gaming since I was 10 years old and, to this day, I own a PlayStation 4 and a Nintendo Switch. Not only do these consoles get a lot of activity as media platforms, but I also have dozens of games that I frequent somewhat regularly.

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco

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How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

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How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

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Skip to Content

AI-powered NPCs that don't need a script could make games-and other worlds-deeply immersive.

First, a confession. I only got into playing video games a little over a year ago (I know, I know). A Christmas gift of an Xbox Series S "for the kids" dragged me-pretty easily, it turns out-into the world of late-night gaming sessions. I was immediately attracted to open-world games, in which you're free to explore a vast simulated world and choose what challenges to accept. Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2), an open-world game set in the Wild West, blew my mind. I rode my horse through sleepy towns, drank in the saloon, visited a vaudeville theater, and fought off bounty hunters. One day I simply set up camp on a remote hilltop to make coffee and gaze down at the misty valley below me.

To make them feel alive, open-world games are inhabited by vast crowds of computer-controlled characters. These animated people-called NPCs, for "nonplayer characters"-populate the bars, city streets, or space ports of games. They make these virtual worlds feel lived in and full. Often-but not always-you can talk to them.

After a while, however, the repetitive chitchat (or threats) of a passing stranger forces you to bump up against the truth: This is just a game. It's still fun-I had a whale of a time, honestly, looting stagecoaches, fighting in bar brawls, and stalking deer through rainy woods-but the illusion starts to weaken when you poke at it. It's only natural. Video games are carefully crafted objects, part of a multibillion-dollar industry, that are designed to be consumed. You play them, you loot a few stagecoaches, you finish, you move on.

It may not always be like that. Just as it is upending other industries, generative AI is opening the door to entirely new kinds of in-game interactions that are open-ended, creative, and unexpected. The game may not always have to end.

Startups employing generative-AI models, like ChatGPT, are using them to create characters that don't rely on scripts but, instead, converse with you freely. Others are experimenting with NPCs who appear to have entire interior worlds, and who can continue to play even when you, the player, are not around to watch. Eventually, generative AI could create game experiences that are infinitely detailed, twisting and changing every time you experience them.

The field is still very new, but it's extremely hot. In 2022 the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz launched Games Fund, a $600 million fund dedicated to gaming startups. A huge number of these are planning to use AI in gaming. And the firm, also known as A16Z, has now invested in two studios that are aiming to create their own versions of AI NPCs. A second $600 million round was announced in April 2024.

Early experimental demos of these experiences are already popping up, and it may not be long before they appear in full games like RDR2. But some in the industry believe this development will not just make future open-world games incredibly immersive; it could change what kinds of game worlds or experiences are even possible. Ultimately, it could change what it means to play.

"What comes after the video game? You know what I mean?" says Frank Lantz, a game designer and director of the NYU Game Center. "Maybe we're on the threshold of a new kind of game."

These guys just won't shut up

The way video games are made hasn't changed much over the years. Graphics are incredibly realistic. Games are bigger. But the way in which you interact with characters, and the game world around you, uses many of the same decades-old conventions.

"In mainstream games, we're still looking at variations of the formula we've had since the 1980s," says Julian Togelius, a computer science professor at New York University who has a startup called Modl.ai that does in-game testing. Part of that tried-and-tested formula is a technique called a dialogue tree, in which all of an NPC's possible responses are mapped out. Which one you get depends on which branch of the dialogue tree you have chosen. For example, say something rude about a passing NPC in RDR2 and the character will probably lash out-you have to quickly apologize to avoid a shootout (unless that's what you want).

In the most expensive, high-profile games, the so-called AAA games like Elden Ring or Starfield, a deeper sense of immersion is created by using brute force to build out deep and vast dialogue trees. The biggest studios employ teams of hundreds of game developers who work for many years on a single game in which every line of dialogue is plotted and planned, and software is written so the in-game engine knows when to deploy that particular line. RDR2 reportedly contains an estimated 500,000 lines of dialogue, voiced by around 700 actors.

"You get around the fact that you can [only] do so much in the world by, like, insane amounts of writing, an insane amount of designing," says Togelius.

Generative AI is already helping take some of that drudgery out of making new games. Jonathan Lai, a general partner at A16Z and one of Games Fund's managers, says that most studios are using image-generating tools like Midjourney to enhance or streamline their work. And in a 2023 survey by A16Z, 87% of game studios said they were already using AI in their workflow in some way-and 99% planned to do so in the future. Many use AI agents to replace the human testers who look for bugs, such as places where a game might crash. In recent months, the CEO of the gaming giant EA said generative AI could be used in more than 50% of its game development processes.

Ubisoft, one of the biggest game developers, famous for AAA open-world games such as Assassin's Creed, has been using a large-language-model-based AI tool called Ghostwriter to do some of the grunt work for its developers in writing basic dialogue for its NPCs. Ghostwriter generates loads of options for background crowd chatter, which the human writer can pick from or tweak. The idea is to free the humans up so they can spend that time on more plot-focused writing.

Ultimately, though, everything is scripted. Once you spend a certain number of hours on a game, you will have seen everything there is to see, and completed every interaction. Time to buy a new one.

But for startups like Inworld AI, this situation is an opportunity. Inworld, based in California, is building tools to make in-game NPCs that respond to a player with dynamic, unscripted dialogue and actions-so they never repeat themselves. The company, now valued at $500 million, is the best-funded AI gaming startup around thanks to backing from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and other high-profile investors.

Role-playing games give us a unique way to experience different realities, explains Kylan Gibbs, Inworld's CEO and founder. But something has always been missing. "Basically, the characters within there are dead," he says.

"When you think about media at large, be it movies or TV or books, characters are really what drive our ability to empathize with the world," Gibbs says. "So the fact that games, which are arguably the most advanced version of storytelling that we have, are lacking these live characters-it felt to us like a pretty major issue."

Gamers themselves were pretty quick to realize that LLMs could help fill this gap. Last year, some came up with ChatGPT mods (a way to alter an existing game) for the popular role-playing game Skyrim. The mods let players interact with the game's vast cast of characters using LLM-powered free chat. One mod even included OpenAI's speech recognition software Whisper AI so that players could speak to the players with their voices, saying whatever they wanted, and have full conversations that were no longer restricted by dialogue trees.

The results gave gamers a glimpse of what might be possible but were ultimately a little disappointing. Though the conversations were open-ended, the character interactions were stilted, with delays while ChatGPT processed each request.

Inworld wants to make this type of interaction more polished. It's offering a product for AAA game studios in which developers can create the brains of an AI NPC that can be then imported into their game. Developers use the company's "Inworld Studio" to generate their NPC. For example, they can fill out a core description that sketches the character's personality, including likes and dislikes, motivations, or useful backstory. Sliders let you set levels of traits such as introversion or extroversion, insecurity or confidence. And you can also use free text to make the character drunk, aggressive, prone to exaggeration-pretty much anything.

Developers can also add descriptions of how their character speaks, including examples of commonly used phrases that Inworld's various AI models, including LLMs, then spin into dialogue in keeping with the character.

"Because there's such reliance on a lot of labor-intensive scripting, it's hard to get characters to handle a wide variety of ways a scenario might play out, especially as games become more and more open-ended." Jeff Orkin, founder, Bitpart

Game designers can also plug other information into the system: what the character knows and doesn't know about the world (no Taylor Swift references in a medieval battle game, ideally) and any relevant safety guardrails (does your character curse or not?). Narrative controls will let the developers make sure the NPC is sticking to the story and isn't wandering wildly off-base in its conversation. The idea is that the characters can then be imported into video-game graphics engines like Unity or Unreal Engine to add a body and features. Inworld is collaborating with the text-to-voice startup ElevenLabs to add natural-sounding voices.

Inworld's tech hasn't appeared in any AAA games yet, but at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in March 2024, the firm unveiled an early demo with Nvidia that showcased some of what will be possible. In Covert Protocol, each player operates as a private detective who must solve a case using input from the various in-game NPCs. Also at the GDC, Inworld unveiled a demo called NEO NPC that it had worked on with Ubisoft. In NEO NPC, a player could freely interact with NPCs using voice-to-text software and use conversation to develop a deeper relationship with them.

LLMs give us the chance to make games more dynamic, says Jeff Orkin, founder of Bitpart AI, a new startup that also aims to create entire casts of LLM-powered NPCs that can be imported into games. "Because there's such reliance on a lot of labor-intensive scripting, it's hard to get characters to handle a wide variety of ways a scenario might play out, especially as games become more and more open-ended," he says.

Bitpart's approach is in part inspired by Orkin's PhD research at MIT's Media Lab. There, he trained AIs to role-play social situations using game-play logs of humans doing the same things with each other in multiplayer games.

Bitpart's casts of characters are trained using a large language model and then fine-tuned in a way that means the in-game interactions are not entirely open-ended and infinite. Instead, the company uses an LLM and other tools to generate a script covering a range of possible interactions, and then a human game designer will select some. Orkin describes the process as authoring the Lego bricks of the interaction. An in-game algorithm searches out specific bricks to string them together at the appropriate time.

Bitpart's approach could create some delightful in-game moments. In a restaurant, for example, you might ask a waiter for something, but the bartender might overhear and join in. Bitpart's AI currently works with Roblox. Orkin says the company is now running trials with AAA game studios, although he won't yet say which ones.

But generative AI might do more than just enhance the immersiveness of existing kinds of games. It could give rise to completely new ways to play.

Making the impossible possible

When I asked Frank Lantz about how AI could change gaming, he talked for 26 minutes straight. His initial reaction to generative AI had been visceral: "I was like, oh my God, this is my destiny and is what I was put on the planet for."

Lantz has been in and around the cutting edge of the game industry and AI for decades but received a cult level of acclaim a few years ago when he created the Universal Paperclips game. The simple in-browser game gives the player the job of producing as many paper clips as possible. It's a riff on the famous thought experiment by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, which imagines an AI that is given the same task and optimizes against humanity's interest by turning all the matter in the known universe into paper clips.

Lantz is bursting with ideas for ways to use generative AI. One is to experience a new work of art as it is being created, with the player participating in its creation. "You're inside of something like Lord of the Rings as it's being written. You're inside a piece of literature that is unfolding around you in real time," he says. He also imagines strategy games where the players and the AI work together to reinvent what kind of game it is and what the rules are, so it is never the same twice.

For Orkin, LLM-powered NPCs can make games unpredictable-and that's exciting. "It introduces a lot of open questions, like what you do when a character answers you but that sends a story in a direction that nobody planned for," he says.

Generative A I might do more than just enhance the immersiveness of existing kinds of games. It could give rise to completely new ways to play.

It might mean games that are unlike anything we've seen thus far. Gaming experiences that unspool as the characters' relationships shift and change, as friendships start and end, could unlock entirely new narrative experiences that are less about action and more about conversation and personalities.

Togelius imagines new worlds built to react to the player's own wants and needs, populated with NPCs that the player must teach or influence as the game progresses. Imagine interacting with characters whose opinions can change, whom you could persuade or motivate to act in a certain way-say, to go to battle with you. "A thoroughly generative game could be really, really good," he says. "But you really have to change your whole expectation of what a game is."

Lantz is currently working on a prototype of a game in which the premise is that you-the player-wake up dead, and the afterlife you are in is a low-rent, cheap version of a synthetic world. The game plays out like a noir in which you must explore a city full of thousands of NPCs powered by a version of ChatGPT, whom you must interact with to work out how you ended up there.

His early experiments gave him some eerie moments when he felt that the characters seemed to know more than they should, a sensation recognizable to people who have played with LLMs before. Even though you know they're not alive, they can still freak you out a bit.

"If you run electricity through a frog's corpse, the frog will move," he says. "And if you run $10 million worth of computation through the internet ... it moves like a frog, you know."

But these early forays into generative-AI gaming have given him a real sense of excitement for what's next: "I felt like, okay, this is a thread. There really is a new kind of artwork here."

If an AI NPC talks and no one is around to listen, is there a sound?

AI NPCs won't just enhance player interactions-they might interact with one another in weird ways. Red Dead Redemption 2's NPCs each have long, detailed scripts that spell out exactly where they should go, what work they must complete, and how they'd react if anything unexpected occurred. If you want, you can follow an NPC and watch it go about its day. It's fun, but ultimately it's hard-coded.

NPCs built with generative AI could have a lot more leeway-even interacting with one another when the player isn't there to watch. Just as people have been fooled into thinking LLMs are sentient, watching a city of generated NPCs might feel like peering over the top of a toy box that has somehow magically come alive.

We're already getting a sense of what this might look like. At Stanford University, Joon Sung Park has been experimenting with AI-generated characters and watching to see how their behavior changes and gains complexity as they encounter one another.

Because large language models have sucked up the internet and social media, they actually contain a lot of detail about how we behave and interact, he says.

COURTESY OF THE DEVELOPERS

COURTESY OF THE DEVELOPERS

COURTESY OF THE DEVELOPERS

In Park's recent research, he and colleagues set up a Sims-like game, called Smallville, with 25 simulated characters that had been trained using generative AI. Each was given a name and a simple biography before being set in motion. When left to interact with each other for two days, they began to exhibit humanlike conversations and behavior, including remembering each other and being able to talk about their past interactions.

For example, the researchers prompted one character to organize a Valentine's Day party-and then let the simulation run. That character sent invitations around town, while other members of the community asked each other on dates to go to the party, and all turned up at the venue at the correct time. All of this was carried out through conversations, and past interactions between characters were stored in their "memories" as natural language.

For Park, the implications for gaming are huge. "This is exactly the sort of tech that the gaming community for their NPCs have been waiting for," he says.

His research has inspired games like AI Town, an open-source interactive experience on GitHub that lets human players interact with AI NPCs in a simple top-down game. You can leave the NPCs to get along for a few days and check in on them, reading the transcripts of the interactions they had while you were away. Anyone is free to take AI Town's code to build new NPC experiences through AI.

For Daniel De Freitas, cofounder of the startup Character AI, which lets users generate and interact with their own LLM-powered characters, the generative-AI revolution will allow new types of games to emerge-ones in which the NPCs don't even need human players.

The player is "joining an adventure that is always happening, that the AIs are playing," he imagines. "It's the equivalent of joining a theme park full of actors, but unlike the actors, they truly 'believe' that they are in those roles."

If you're getting Westworld vibes right about now, you're not alone. There are plenty of stories about people torturing or killing their simple Sims characters in the game for fun. Would mistreating NPCs that pass for real humans cross some sort of new ethical boundary? What if, Lantz asks, an AI NPC that appeared conscious begged for its life when you simulated torturing it?

It raises complex questions he adds. "One is: What are the ethical dimensions of pretend violence? And the other is: At what point do AIs become moral agents to which harm can be done?"

There are other potential issues too. An immersive world that feels real, and never ends, could be dangerously addictive. Some users of AI chatbots have already reported losing hours and even days in conversation with their creations. Are there dangers that the same parasocial relationships could emerge with AI NPCs?

"We may need to worry about people forming unhealthy relationships with game characters at some point," says Togelius. Until now, players have been able to differentiate pretty easily between game play and real life. But AI NPCs might change that, he says: "If at some point what we now call 'video games' morph into some all-encompassing virtual reality, we will probably need to worry about the effect of NPCs being too good, in some sense."

A portrait of the artist as a young bot

Not everyone is convinced that never-ending open-ended conversations between the player and NPCs are what we really want for the future of games.

"I think we have to be cautious about connecting our imaginations with reality," says Mike Cook, an AI researcher and game designer. "The idea of a game where you can go anywhere, talk to anyone, and do anything has always been a dream of a certain kind of player. But in practice, this freedom is often at odds with what we want from a story."

In other words, having to generate a lot of the dialogue yourself might actually get kind of ... well, boring. "If you can't think of interesting or dramatic things to say, or are simply too tired or bored to do it, then you're going to basically be reading your own very bad creative fiction," says Cook.

Orkin likewise doesn't think conversations that could go anywhere are actually what most gamers want. "I want to play a game that a bunch of very talented, creative people have really thought through and created an engaging story and world," he says.

This idea of authorship is an important part of game play, agrees Togelius. "You can generate as much as you want," he says. "But that doesn't guarantee that anything is interesting and worth keeping. In fact, the more content you generate, the more boring it might be."

Sometimes, the possibility of everything is too much to cope with. No Man's Sky, a hugely hyped space game launched in 2016 that used algorithms to generate endless planets to explore, was seen by many players as a bit of a letdown when it finally arrived. Players quickly discovered that being able to explore a universe that never ended, with worlds that were endlessly different, actually fell a little flat. (A series of updates over subsequent years has made No Man's Sky a little more structured, and it's now generally well thought of.)

One approach might be to keep AI gaming experiences tight and focused.

Hilary Mason, CEO at the gaming startup Hidden Door, likes to joke that her work is "artisanal AI." She is from Brooklyn, after all, says her colleague Chris Foster, the firm's game director, laughing.

Hidden Door, which has not yet released any products, is making role-playing text adventures based on classic stories that the user can steer. It's like Dungeons & Dragons for the generative AI era. It stitches together classic tropes for certain adventure worlds, and an annotated database of thousands of words and phrases, and then uses a variety of machine-learning tools, including LLMs, to make each story unique. Players walk through a semi-unstructured storytelling experience, free-typing into text boxes to control their character.

The result feels a bit like hand-annotating an AI-generated novel with Post-it notes.

In a demo with Mason, I got to watch as her character infiltrated a hospital and attempted to hack into the server. Each suggestion prompted the system to spin up the next part of the story, with the large language model creating new descriptions and in-game objects on the fly.

Each experience lasts between 20 and 40 minutes, and for Foster, it creates an "expressive canvas" that people can play with. The fixed length and the added human touch-Mason's artisanal approach-give players "something really new and magical," he says.

There's more to life than games

Park thinks generative AI that makes NPCs feel alive in games will have other, more fundamental implications further down the line.

"This can, I think, also change the meaning of what games are," he says.

For example, he's excited about using generative-AI agents to simulate how real people act. He thinks AI agents could one day be used as proxies for real people to, for example, test out the likely reaction to a new economic policy. Counterfactual scenarios could be plugged in that would let policymakers run time backwards to try to see what would have happened if a different path had been taken.

"You want to learn that if you implement this social policy or economic policy, what is going to be the impact that it's going to have on the target population?" he suggests. "Will there be unexpected side effects that we're not going to be able to foresee on day one?"

And while Inworld is focused on adding immersion to video games, it has also worked with LG in South Korea to make characters that kids can chat with to improve their English language skills. Others are using Inworld's tech to create interactive experiences. One of these, called Moment in Manzanar, was created to help players empathize with the Japanese-Americans the US government detained in internment camps during World War II. It allows the user to speak to a fictional character called Ichiro who talks about what it was like to be held in the Manzanar camp in California.

Inworld's NPC ambitions might be exciting for gamers (my future excursions as a cowboy could be even more immersive!), but there are some who believe using AI to enhance existing games is thinking too small. Instead, we should be leaning into the weirdness of LLMs to create entirely new kinds of experiences that were never possible before, says Togelius. The shortcomings of LLMs "are not bugs-they're features," he says.

Lantz agrees. "You have to start with the reality of what these things are and what they do-this kind of latent space of possibilities that you're surfing and exploring," he says. "These engines already have that kind of a psychedelic quality to them. There's something trippy about them. Unlocking that is the thing that I'm interested in."

Whatever is next, we probably haven't even imagined it yet, Lantz thinks.

"And maybe it's not about a simulated world with pretend characters in it at all," he says. "Maybe it's something totally different. I don't know. But I'm excited to find out."

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Illustration by Rose Wong

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How generative AI could reinvent what it means to play

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AI-powered NPCs that don't need a script could make games-and other worlds-deeply immersive.

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How GENERATIVE AI mimicks the HUMAN BRAIN – does AI OUTDO human thinking YET? 

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How GENERATIVE AI mimicks the HUMAN BRAIN – does AI OUTDO human thinking YET? 

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How GENERATIVE AI mimicks the HUMAN BRAIN – does AI OUTDO human thinking YET? (VIDEO)