A new interactive fiction game called GPT Adventure, writes itself and course corrects as you play it. The game is the brainchild of a Northwestern University neuroscience grad named Nathan Whitmore who says he was inspired by Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game“ series to create the game.

“When I read Ender’s Game, one of the parts that most stuck with me was the delightfully creepy Mind Game — a game designed to probe the player’s subconscious,” writes Whitmore on his blog, Quick! To the Rat Cave. “In the book, we learn that the Mind Game isn’t actually programmed — it’s powered by an AI that makes up the gameplay as it goes, reacting to the player’s decisions and getting progressively more surreal.”

Whitmore created his real-life version of Mind Game using OpenAI’s news-writing algorithm GPT2 (yes, the infamous fake news-writing algorithm).


GPT Adventure generates as you play by a neural network that Whitmore trained on transcripts of existing text adventure games like “Zork” and “Adventureland.”

What’s the goal of this game? Exploring, I guess. Even the game is making it up as it goes along, and that’s what makes it interesting

[Related: Mysterious Text Adventure Code was Found in a Prisoner’s Files]

Because none of the logic is explicitly programmed, you can do some other cool things, like making your character start in space for example, instead of a meadow, GPT2 will roll with it, though the training on classic adventure games means that it will occasionally try to fill your spaceship with moss.

If you’re interested in taking trip down the rabbit hole, you can check it out here.

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StoryFix Media produces interactive fiction games and novels. Our sci-fi text adventure The Pulse is out now. Our novels New Horizons and The Blue Moon are available now.

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