The battle over Reddit’s API changes continues, even after coming into effect. Reddit's decision to charge for access to its API was supposedly aimed at companies scraping the website to train Large Language Models for generative AI, but the decision also affects thousands of third-party clients and apps that tie into the platform, including ones with powerful moderation tools not available on the main site and app. Thousands of communities protested the move by setting their subreddits private and making them inaccessible.
Following the API changes, several popular subreddits that historically prohibited porn have started allowing users to post NSFW – Not Safe For Work – content. These communities include r/mildlyinteresting and r/videos. In r/TIHI’s (Thanks, I Hate It) case, a stickied post says the subreddit is removing a rule that forbids extreme NSFW content and will now welcome it, as long as it’s legal under US law. By allowing their subreddits to be filled with posts deemed not safe for work, the moderators have made sure Reddit can't monetize them. The site’s response to the situation has been swift – administrators have reportedly removed whole moderating teams for communities that labeled themselves NSFW.
So far, these protests have had little effect on Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. He told NPR: "It's a small group that's very upset, and there's no way around that. We made a business decision that upset them."
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It’s back again. This time, it’s real-time. With Final Fantasy XVI, the series’ creators have decided the franchise's future is action-centric and storyline driven. And it’s heavily inspired by epic TV fantasy series. Until now, the Final Fantasy games have never quite had their angry, moody dark moment. With nuanced, occasionally horny characters and often a lot of violence, is this the series’ moody teenager era? The tale of FFXVI is achingly Game of Thrones-y, but sometimes the inspiration is a little on the nose: Dad dies early on? Check. Mysterious wolves? Check. Creepy mother-son relations? Check. While this is a very different kind of game for the series, for those looking for a fantasy adventure with a plot that’s kept me hooked, the 16th Final Fantasy delivers.
Google’s WiFi products have always offered an acceptable blend of power, price and performance. The Nest WiFi Pro, the company’s latest flagship, builds on that existing formula by adding WiFi 6E. Part of its appeal is the Google brand, plus the promise of regular free software updates and tight integrations with most of the world’s smart home players. You won’t get into the fundamentals of running a network, but it should appeal to people who want to set up a guest network quickly. Something like the TP-Link XE75 might run faster and offer more features, but for this price, Google’s made the right compromises.
And Nintendo’s remastering 'Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon' for the Switch.
An unusual SNES classic is getting the remake treatment. Super Mario RPG is back with "brand-new graphics" and it's coming to Nintendo Switch on November 17th. The 1996 original was the very first Mario RPG, made in collaboration with Squaresoft (now Square Enix). It tasks Mario, Bowser, Peach and friends with taking down a mechanical enemy named Smithy and recovering stolen pieces of the Star Road. The remake uses the same art style as modern Mario games. Nintendo is also working on an updated version of Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon – perhaps not a huge surprise given the success of Luigi's Mansion 3.
And not all of these over-ear models will break the bank.
For Engadget’s best wireless headphones guide, we tested several models with a variety of features, including noise cancellation and sound quality. Plus, our favorites span a range of prices, so you can decide how much you’re comfortable spending and, ultimately, get the best buy for you. That includes a set for a mere $79.
Categories include sexual themes, gambling and significant profanity or vulgarity.
Twitch has overhauled its mature content policies, switching from a general toggle to specific categories describing what viewers can expect. The new Content Classification Labels are myriad, including mature-rated games, sexual themes, significant profanity or vulgarity, gambling, violent and graphic depictions and, lastly, drugs, intoxication or excessive tobacco use. The ratings apply to both the game and you. For example, if you're playing a mature-rated game, Twitch will automatically label it as such. But, if you're playing an E-rated game and you’re excessively swearing, you must mark your stream as having significant profanity or vulgarity.
AST SpaceMobile recently completed a two-way voice call.
Earlier this year, AST SpaceMobile, with the help of AT&T, connected an off-the-shelf Samsung Galaxy S22 to a satellite in low-Earth orbit to complete a two-way voice call. Now the company says it’s one step closer to bringing the technology to consumers. AST recently completed multiple tests in Hawaii where its engineers saw download speeds of 10Mbps from the company’s BlueWalker 3 satellite to unmodified phones on the ground.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-popular-subreddits-welcomed-adult-content-to-protest-reddit-changes-111510310.html?src=rss
Super Mario Bros. Wonder, a new but classic adventure featuring Mario and friends, is coming to Nintendo Switch on October 20th, 2023. The new game is a 2D sidescroller with busy, bright environments and plenty of secrets to uncover, starring Mario, Luigi, Toad, Princess Peach, Princess Daisy and Yoshi as playable characters. It also introduces Mario's newest power-up, which transforms him into Elephant Mario. Why not, you know?
Nintendo describes Super Mario Bros. Wonder as the next evolution of the series' traditional 2D sidescrolling mechanics.
"When you touch a Wonder Flower in the game, the wonders of the world unlock — pipes could come alive, hordes of enemies may appear, characters might change their looks, for example — transforming the gameplay in unpredictable ways," Nintendo says in a press release.
Pre-orders are live now for Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/play-as-elephant-mario-in-super-mario-bros-wonder-on-october-20th-145814400.html?src=rss
Detective Pikachu Returns is due to hit Nintendo Switch on October 6th, 2023, and it's available to wishlist today. Nintendo announced a new entry in the franchise back in 2019, hot on the heels of the Detective Pikachu movie, which was an overall, adorable success.
Detective Pikachu, the original game, came out worldwide in 2018. It gave Pikachu a new friend and a voice, transforming him into a gruff private investigator and infusing the game with Ace Attorney vibes. It's more of a narrative adventure than traditional Pokemon games — which makes sense, considering the film that followed.
The new installment reunites Pikachu with his pal Tim Goodman, and as the debut trailer shows, hijinks ensure. Regardless of the game's plot, it's always a treat to see Pikachu in a little hat, holding a cup of coffee and contemplating life's mysteries.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/detective-pikachu-returns-lands-on-switch-october-6th-143306630.html?src=rss
It’s back again. This time, it’s real-time. With Final Fantasy XVI, the series’ creators have decided that the future of the franchise is action-centric and storyline driven. And it’s been inspired by epic fantasy series from television. Until now, the Final Fantasy games have never quite had their angry, moody dark moment. With nuanced, occasionally horny characters and often a lot of violence, is this the series’ moody teenager era?
FFXVI is the first game in the series made for the PS5, expanding the detail of both character models and environments. While the significant characters move and emote realistically, Square Enix has kept an artistic touch to character design. The most impressive parts are the environments, with gorgeous forests, medieval fortresses and major landmarks towering over the usual fields and cliffs you’ll be exploring and fighting at. The quality isn't consistent enough in an era of games like Horizon: Forbidden West, Dead Space andElden Ring, though. I noticed when character models and environments weren’t given the same attention as key scenes and chapters.
Unlike previous Final Fantasy games, while there’s still an ensemble cast, you’ll only ever control the protagonist Clive — yes, an interesting choice in hero name, one that even some in-game characters are... surprised by. You’ll eventually be able to offer simple commands to your faithful wolf, Torgal, and you’ll be joined by other companions that will fight entirely independently of you. These include your childhood friend Jill, the mysterious daddy of thunder, Cid, and several more spoiler(ish) additions.
Fortunately, and unlike an awful lot of non-playable battle allies in RPGs, they can usually attract the attention of a monster or two and even finish off enemies by themselves. Still, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s an even looser party battle dynamic than its predecessor Final Fantasy XV, let alone older titles.
The tale of FFXVI is achingly Game Of Thrones-y. It starts out as a battle of warring states, of religion versus monarchy, wars for the sake of controlling resources — or escaping inhospitable land. Sometimes the inspiration is a little on the nose: Dad dies early on? Check. Mysterious wolves? Check. Creepy mother-son relations? Check. However, the series has always drawn on pop-culture inspiration over the years: Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have all been tugged at for monster names, storylines and more.
Within the opening hours, we meet Clive, his sickly (but ‘chosen’) younger brother Joshua and their childhood friend, Jill. Clive and Joshua’s mother, the Cersei-styled Anabella Rosfield, swiftly betrays her family and the entire nation. The leader, her husband, is slaughtered in front of Joshua, whose latent powers as a dominant fully awakened due to this trauma. Arguably even more harrowing, a chocobo (the game series’ giant bird mounts) gets bricked in the head and someone kills an owl. This all happens in the span of a couple of minutes.
In the form of the giant fire Eikon (elemental deity), Phoenix, Joshua burns enemies and allies alike to ash, and as Clive watches, horrified, he somehow unleashes a new, never-before-seen Eikon of his own, Ifrit, who has a surprisingly grisly encounter with Phoenix. Clive wakes up with no memory of this, however, while a foreboding figure in a hood watches all of this unfold, So yeah, the perfect pilot episode of a fantasy series on HBO. The superb voice acting and writing really helps sell the melodrama and seriousness of the story. For a series often criticized for cliche or awkward translations, this is all so much better. The voice actor for Cid is Ralph Ineson – who was even in GoT. Get ready for lots of Yorkshire accents: It’s time for all to learn what “ta-ra” means. Square Enix notes that, even if you pick the Japanese language setting, the game’s lip sync is set to the English version.
Square Enix
If you haven’t played a Final Fantasy title before — and Square Enix is positioning this as an action game for that kind of player — Ifrit is usually a run-of-the-mill summonable demon. He’s rarely a crucial plot pivot, so it’s cool to see the series subvert expectations and pay tribute to the games of the past. There are lots of Easter eggs like this, both subtle and obvious.
The crystal theme, originally penned for the first Final Fantasy game on the Nintendo Entertainment System, is remixed and dropped in during multiple points of the game, while Cid (a character found in every FF game, either as a non-playable character or party member) has a daughter called Mid — a reference to the grandson of Final Fantasy V's version of Cid.
While other games, including spin-offs and Final Fantasy XV, have touched on real-time combat, Final Fantasy XVI goes all in. It’s dangerous new territory for a series with some die-hard fans, but possibly a necessary move to attract a new audience.
But it’s not Devil May Fantasy. It doesn’t appear to be a particularly deep system on either the default or story-centric difficulties. I found myself leaning on abilities I knew could do sustained damage, doing well-timed dodges and countering.
There are layers to battles – but they’re easy to ignore. Mid-game skills like the ability to jump and then kick-off an enemy, or launch yourself into the air with a pull attack normally used to sling smaller enemies toward you, offer some more vertical approaches to combat. However, I rarely needed to figure this out during battles, and it was more about relentlessly attacking and paying attention to incoming attacks that enemies usually signposted. Clive will bolster his initial fire attacks, courtesy of Phoenix, with skills from other Eikons, adding new forms of attack or counters. If there’s some kind of elemental scissors-paper-rock dynamic, I didn’t notice it, or missed an explanation.
The major difference between action- and story-focus modes is the inclusion of several accessories that make FFXVI one of the most accessible (and forgiving) action RPGs I’ve ever played. You’ll start the game with a handful of accessories like the Ring of Timely Focus which slows down when an evadable attack approaches, giving you ample time to dodge. The Ring of Timely Strikes will unleash a barrage of complex attacks just by spamming the square button. I played with the Ring of Timely Focus occasionally equipped, helping me to hold my own in more difficult scenes filled with enemies, but tried to fight the bigger enemies (and bosses) with only my own skills. There is a new game plus mode that offers hardier enemies and challenges, but I haven’t had time to play it yet.
The bosses, while spectacular, have a tendency towards being damage sponges – especially the Eikon-on-Eikon fights that typically include three or more transitions in a single battle. Once you’ve figured out the timing of dodges to attacks, it’s often repeated to boredom. But hey, they always look cool. Some of these boss fights are.. incredibly epic – and I mean Bayonetta-level of ridiculous. There aren’t many boss battles in video games that reach the level of Clive’s duel against Bahamut…
Final Fantasy XVI also has a wonderful hidden weapon: Its own built-in wiki. Active Time Lore, a play on active time battles from the series’ arguable heyday of the late-’90s, not only fills in the narrative gaps plaguing FF but plenty of other politically tilted RPGs.
Both FFXII and FFXIII suffered from lots of fictional terminology and complicated back-story. With the latter, developers relegated anything close to a glossary to menus that were difficult to navigate and consequently rarely investigated.
Square Enix
Active Time Lore, which can be summoned from the touchpad during almost any scene or area, brings a convenient shortcut to that tip-of-the-tongue, which-warring-state-is-he-from-again quandary. It’s an elegant solution, inspired by Amazon Prime Video’s X-Ray feature. It also ensures gamers don’t come undone when there are so many political maneuverings, time skips, false deaths and hooded strangers.
All of this is augmented by Vivian, a character whose sole purpose appears to be educating Clive about the wider political implications of his fight to dismantle the political structure around huge magical crystals (by destroying them), dominants (by besting them, usually) and freeing indentured magic-wielding slaves. All while seeking vengeance for his brother.
Talking with her at your base of operations will open a handy personnel chart of all the main characters, their associates, and the rest. It also comes with a chronological slider, so you can guess who’ll betray who next. If you came undone during a season of Game of Thrones, you might understand why this could be needed.
Square Enix
Final Fantasy XVI is different – perhaps due to the producer, Naoki Yoshida, who worked on the online MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV as both producer and director. But with Final Fantasy VII Remake (including the next chapter) offering the party battles I want, I don’t see a problem in Square Enix taking the series in this direction. I miss the party battle dynamics, but I didn’t feel hamstrung by my own mediocre action game reflexes or skills. If you are looking for challenging battles, the game comes with post-game content aimed at completionists and the muscular of thumb. But for those looking for a fantasy adventure with a plot that’s kept me hooked – so far – the sixteenth Final Fantasy delivers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/final-fantasy-xvi-review-ps5-140058789.html?src=rss
Apple has updated its Podcasts app on iOS, iPadOS and macOS with features that make it easier to find content in your favorite genres. It now includes nine new subcategories: Mental Health, Relationships, Self-Improvement, Personal Journals, Entrepreneurship, Documentary, Parenting, Books and Language learning. Those come on top of existing subcategories like True Crime, Sports and others.
Apple has been focused on mental health over the past few years, and recently introduced the Journal app that lets you document how you're feeling. In addition, the company recently introduced a mood tracking feature as part of Health in iOS 17. The addition of the Mental Health subcategory in Podcasts, along with others like Relationships, Self-Improvement and Personal Journals, appears to be part of that.
Apple
Each subcategory has its own charts showing top shows and episodes in your particular market. "For example, a listener in the U.S. can browse the charts for Mental Health, which display the top 200 shows and top 200 episodes available in the U.S. based on a mix of listening, follows, and completion rate," Apple wrote in its Podcasts for Creators blog.
As a point of comparison, Spotify has eight main podcast categories and no less than 54 subcategories. YouTube offers 14 main podcast categories and PocketCast 19, but neither offer subcategories. With the new additions, Apple appears to offer a good selection without overwhelming users.
The nine new subcategories, along with the 19 primary categories, have been updated with new artwork and recommendations as well. The latter includes New & Noteworthy shows, Shows of the Month, Feature Channels and Creators and global Highlights.
With the upcoming release of iOS 17, Apple is adding some new Podcasts features like a refreshed Now Play experience and Queue, episode art, search filters and more. Podcasts updates have been relatively sparse, though, with the last major one coming a year ago with new Podcasts Charts. Apple's major rival Spotify, which spent big on podcasts back in 2019, recently laid off 200 employees from that division.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-podcasts-update-makes-it-easier-to-find-content-in-your-favorite-genres-125458706.html?src=rss
TikTok has enjoyed a significant advantage over Instagram Reels in that anyone can download a TikTok video and post it to another social media network — something that helps draw new users to the platform. Now, Instagram has finally gained that ability, according to a post by CEO Adam Mosseri (using the new broadcast channels feature) spotted by TechCrunch.
The feature is only available to US users on mobile for now, and only for public and not private accounts. At the same time, users with public accounts can choose a setting that blocks users from downloading their Reels. To use the feature, you tap on the "Share" icon for a given Reel and select "Download."
Engadget
An image posted by Mosseri (top) appears to show that downloaded Reels will be watermarked with the Instagram logo and name of the account, much as TikTok does. YouTube also started adding watermarks to Shorts videos created on desktop, likely also as a way to bring attention to its short video feature.
Instagram now appears to be taking the same tack, likely also seeing it as a way to ensure people see Reels on other social media networks. It's not going out of its way to accommodate videos from rival platforms, though. The Meta-owned company allows TikTok and other videos to be uploaded, but its algorithms stopped promoting any watermarked videos from rivals back in 2021.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/instagram-finally-lets-users-download-reels-093425845.html?src=rss
It looks like Fake Drake won’t be taking home a Grammy. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said this week that although the organization will consider music with limited AI-generated voices or instrumentation for award recognition, it will only honor songs written and performed “mostly by a human.”
“At this point, we are going to allow AI music and content to be submitted, but the Grammys will only be allowed to go to human creators who have contributed creatively in the appropriate categories,” Mason said in an interview with Grammy.com. “If there’s an AI voice singing the song or AI instrumentation, we’ll consider it. But in a songwriting-based category, it has to have been written mostly by a human. Same goes for performance categories – only a human performer can be considered for a Grammy. If AI did the songwriting or created the music, that’s a different consideration. But the Grammy will go to human creators at this point.”
The CEO’s comments mean the fake Drake / The Weeknd song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which went viral earlier this year before getting wiped from streaming platforms over copyright takedowns, wouldn’t be eligible. Another AI-generated scammer sold fake Frank Ocean tracks in April for a reported CAD 13,000 ($9,722 in US dollars), while Spotify has been busy purging tens of thousands of AI-made songs from its library.
On the other hand, it raises questions about artists like Holly Herndon, who used an AI version of her voice for a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” (The AI-generated performance would suggest not, but would the fact that it’s her own voice make a difference?) Or, for that matter, there’s the upcoming “final” Beatles track that Paul McCartney says will use AI to isolate a garbled recording of John Lennon’s voice. And would Taryn Southern, who (also transparently) used AI to co-produce her 2018 debut album, be eligible? We reached out to the Recording Academy for clarification about these examples and will update this article if they respond.
Awards or not, Mason acknowledged that AI would upend the music industry. “AI is going to absolutely, unequivocally have a hand in shaping the future of our industry,” Mason said. “So, we have to start planning around that and thinking about what that means for us. How can we adapt to accommodate? How can we set guardrails and standards? There are a lot of things that need to be addressed around AI as it relates to our industry.” The CEO added that the Recording Academy recently held a summit “with industry leaders, tech entrepreneurs, streaming platforms, and people from the artist community” to discuss AI’s future. “We talked about the subject and discussed how the Recording Academy can be helpful: how we can play a role and the future of AI in music.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai-generated-music-wont-win-a-grammy-anytime-soon-211855194.html?src=rss
Roblox has traditionally been most popular among kids and pre-teens, despite it claiming to be a “platform for all ages.” Now, in a departure from its family-friendly reputation, the company says it will allow creators to make content specifically for users 17 and older. This isn’t an insignificant portion of Roblox’s user base either – the platform said in its press release Tuesday that in 2022, 38 percent of its daily active users were over 17.
In particular, Roblox says that creators will be able to “feature more mature themes and storylines in TV shows and stand-up comedy.” According to the company, this may include violence, blood, crude humor, romantic themes and alcohol. Players may see “unplayable” gambling content as well, though it is not immediately clear what that would entail. We have asked Robox to clarify.
To access this content you’ll need to verify your age by uploading a photo of your driver’s license or ID along with a selfie to verify that you are who you say you are. Roblox says that this system will provide “greater confidence in people’s age and identity,” and that more age verification methods may be added in the future.
Eligible creators can start making these experiences starting today. These experiences will start rolling out to “eligible” users in the coming weeks. Roblox says that its goal is to provide a safe and engaging experience for people ages 17 or older. The company isn’t being specific on what qualifies as an “eligible” creator or user. We’ve reached out to Roblox for comment and will update this story if we’ve heard back.
Roblox has traditionally marketed itself to younger audiences. For example, earlier this year, the company partnered with Razer to release kid-specific Roblox Edition gaming gear. But with a little over a third of that user base being over the age of 17, it makes sense that the company wants to provide more content geared toward adults.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/roblox-now-allows-creators-to-build-content-for-people-17-and-older-195024163.html?src=rss
Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based in their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.
What’s behind (hidden) door number one
Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.
Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.
Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)
“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”
“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.
“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”
The building blocks of a cursed village
Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.
Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them 'story thread templates' and they're at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”
Hidden Door
The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village curse, “you don't know what it is,” Mason said. “You don't know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”
Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.
Safety (and inclusivity) first
We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.
“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one's ever tried that before’ or ‘that's gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.
“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that's not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We're not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”
Hidden Door
The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”
That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they're respected throughout the system,” she said. “There's no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It'll be randomly assigned.”
Go ahead, snoop around
Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes and other forms of mass violence, players can do most anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It's the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.
But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You're discovering new locations that get generated as you're playing these stories and the world grows.”
And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.
“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you're persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”
Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.
“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody's version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.
In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward, or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.
“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That's been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”
16 secret herbs and language models
Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.
We use a variety of models, some of them were building on open source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It's not just one big LLM, it's decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if it can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”
“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that is just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.
This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.
Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)
While the game is designed to be family friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the table top for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.
“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”
Hidden Door
The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and inclusion of story arcs.
There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you're on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don't like you or you don't have the kind of relationship. That is something that's very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”
The future of interactive fandom
“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn't raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out, and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”
“I do think there's a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don't currently have.”
If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-do-you-prevent-an-ai-generated-game-from-losing-the-plot-170002788.html?src=rss
Following his departure as host of The Daily Show last December, Trevor Noah is partnering with Spotify to launch a podcast, Variety first reported. Weekly episodes of the yet-to-be-named series should feature "in-depth and freewheeling" discussions with influential figures across the globe.
The announcement came during a conversation between Noah and Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity about connecting with audiences as a creator. Noah said he is excited to "engage in interesting and meaningful conversations with some of the world's most fascinating people. We'll also probably fix every single issue humankind has ever faced so you definitely want to join us for every episode."
Noah credited the ability to record a podcast from anywhere in the world as one of the things that attracted him to the medium. The sentiment reflects part of his reasoning behind leaving The Daily Show after seven years: "I miss learning other languages and going to other countries and putting on shows. I miss just being everywhere, doing everything."
The news comes only days after Spotify and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex parted ways. The reported $25 million deal led to the creation of a single podcast in three years, Archetypes. Over 12 episodes, Meghan Markle interviewed well-known figures — including Noah — about the stereotypes women face. Unlike Archetypes, which was exclusive to Spotify, Noah's upcoming podcast will be available on other platforms.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/trevor-noah-is-launching-a-weekly-talk-show-podcast-on-spotify-113516329.html?src=rss
