Zork Reimagined: Interactive Fiction in the Age of AI

Presenter Information

Aleksey Tikhonov, Inworld.AIFollow

Submission Type

Paper

Start Date/Time (EDT)

18-7-2024 3:30 PM

End Date/Time (EDT)

18-7-2024 4:30 PM

Location

Hypertexts & Fictions

Abstract

Classic interactive fiction has unique charm but faces known limitations; early IF games have complex user interfaces that are not intuitive for new players. They also often fail to understand user commands, leading to immersion-breaking default responses. Modern neural network-based games offer more flexibility but suffer from hallucinations, incoherence, and lack of overarching story structures. To address these issues, we propose a system that combines the strengths of both classic and modern approaches. It transforms the classic game Zork (Blank et al., 1979) into smoother narration with a controllable literary style while preserving the original plot and game logic. It can also be applied to other games and potentially to different game types, enhancing their narrative depth and player engagement. While current technologies cannot yet fully automate engaging story creation, we believe integrations like this offer a promising direction for the future of interactive fiction.

Bio

Aleksey Tikhonov is a scientist, researcher, and artist from Berlin, Germany, currently working as a Head of Research for Inworld.AI.

Aleksey does a lot of experiments in different media, including:

• Paper "Unrolling Virtual Worlds for Immersive Experiences" at Machine Learning for Creativity and Design NeurIPS 2023 Workshop.
• Spotlight Award at Machine Learning for Creativity and Design NeurIPS 2021 Workshop for CLIP-guided text2pixelart generation project.
• ASCIIvyaz (2021) is an exploration into automating the creation of ligatures in the style of Slavic calligraphy, known as Vyaz. This project embarked on converting traditional Vyaz into ASCII art, leveraging a blend of algorithms for assembling ligatures in various sequences to achieve optimal aesthetic resemblance at the intersection of technology and traditional art forms.
• Paranoid Transformer - the project on fiction generation, started as a NaNoGenMo (2019) entry; received New Sight award from Dead Alive Magazine, later published as a book in hardcover; the project was presented on NeurIPS ML for Creativity Workshop Gallery (2020), followed by the paper on Future Internet (2020).
• Various projects on music generation, including Neuro-Scriabin — generation of music for a live orchestra in the style of Scriabin, was performed live on the opening of Yet Another Conference (2017); Neural music box — RPy-based infinite music generator, based on variational recurrent network, presented as a paper on CMMR (2017); Drum patterns from latent space — generation and interactive exploration of the drum patterns latent space (2019).
• Various projects on stylized poetry generation, including Neural Defense and Neurona — neuro-tributes to punk groups of the 90s, were presented on NeurIPS ML for Creativity Workshop Gallery and published as EPs online.

Recommended Citation

Tikhonov, Aleksey, "Zork Reimagined: Interactive Fiction in the Age of AI" (2024). ELO (Un)linked 2024. 3.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/elo2024/hypertextsandfictions/schedule/3