Gaming

It would be difficult, yes. I'm a software developer myself and have been working with LLMs on personal projects recently, so I've got some context on the challenges involved.

The hype around LLMs is obviously all "Yeah just throw AI at the problem! AI can do it!" but the reality is that you will always need a good amount of normal coding to wrap around that and make the LLM inputs and outputs sane and interoperable with the rest of your system. So I'm very aware.

My real wonder is that with an appropriate implementation, how much of the classical aspects of the game could you ultimately and eventually move to LLMs, which is what the patent seems to be suggesting.

For example, if you used LLM only for character dialogue and nothing else, it would go something like this:

• You talk to an NPC and insult them
• The convo is assessed and it tweaks some hidden classically programmed reputation and faction variables
• You go to the base of a faction associated
• Those variables determine the faction is hostile

But you could potentially use LLMs to manage more aspects directly, and that could look like this:

• You talk to an NPC and insult them
• An LLM summary of your actions is written to a world log
• You go to the base of the faction associated
• The controller LLM parses the entire world log for your actions relevant to the faction and determines the result as hostility, including extracting reasoning for that which members of the faction can confront you on if spoken to

Now that's already a lot of work and the only bit of classic programming we really took out is how the rep system is managed. But we gained some flexibility in that the source of your relationship with the faction could come from any action anywhere, including ones the game designers never even dreamed up, not just certain things which were pre-known to update it.

Where decisions actually interact with the game world will always need to be classically programmed (like being hostile and what that means and how it causes the characters to act, do they shoot you, what it means to 'shoot' and 'move' etc) and there will need to be a way to interface with that, but LLMs could introduce some level of flexibility in places where that wasn't possible before.

A reaulting problem though is that the more you give to LLMs, the more the entire thing is likely to unravel and become incoherent, without doing even more work to prevent that, and there will still be cracks.

Is it ultimately feasible? I don't know, but it will be interesting for whoever gets to try.