When you combine “water” and “water”, you get “lake”. Adding “fire” to “mountain” results in “volcano.” If you combine “Titanic” and “Poison Ivy,” you get something called “Poison Titanic.”
In the browser-based video game Infinite Craft, players connect blocks of text to discover entire universes from scratch, with all outcomes managed by artificial intelligence. Playing is like peering into an AI’s brain, role-playing what life would look like if controlled by a large-scale language model.
While many of Infinite Craft’s recipes are practical, the AI can also produce outlandish results. Players discovered “Bubble Butt Wizard,” “Farming Simulator 2013: Furry Shades of Grey,” and hosted an open mic comedy night at a Toronto brewery. .
“There’s something weird about using AI to make games,” says Neal Agarwal, independent developer at Infinite Craft. “There are moments of brilliance, but other times it’s like talking to a 5-year-old.”
The video game industry is one industry that is considering the power of incredibly fast and realistic AI generators. Many designers and players have expressed concern that artificial intelligence will replace artists, resulting in a glut of cheap, lackluster products. As studios look for ways to manage rising costs, Blizzard Entertainment is using visual assets from World of Warcraft and Overwatch to train its own image generator.
Infinite Craft is an unusual game that uses buzzy AI tools and doesn’t feel like it’s using the technology as a cheat code. Agarwal said he believes AI is best deployed in open-ended games, rather than as a replacement for people doing purely artistic work.
“I could imagine future sandbox games that programmers couldn’t create,” he said.
The main technology behind Infinite Craft is Meta’s large-scale language model Llama 2. Every time a user tries a new combination of terms, known as the highly sought-after “first discovery,” Llama 2 calculates a new answer. Agarwal set up layers of prompts and filters in hopes that the AI generator’s solution would not be disjointed or unpleasant.
Generators don’t necessarily follow science or logic. “Peanut” and “yama” are equivalent to “yama”. Everest,” but its absurdity makes it even more appealing. Pandora’s box of eccentric works includes “Osama Bin Donuts,” “Super Mario Shrekopanos,” and “Transfamily Guy.”
“The AI is unstable, so sometimes the obvious things when you put two things together don’t happen,” said Ashton Fulmer, a 20-year-old YouTuber who has played the game for more than 30 hours. “It would produce the most off-brand, weird stuff. It would spark curiosity.”
When you play Infinite Craft, you feel like a god writing stream-of-consciousness modernist poetry. Agarwal, 26, said his design was inspired by games like his Little Alchemy and his Doodle God, where you have to combine elements to unlock more. While these games were limited by a set library of resources, Infinite Craft can generate entries forever.
According to Agarwal, more than 300 million handicrafts are made every day. The game was released on January 31st, with little promotion and no guidelines on how to play it, but it was popular among influencers who typically play titles like Lethal His Company and Fortnite, as well as Wardle.
YouTuber Noah Crody, known as The Sophist, compared Infinite Craft to other easy-to-play games such as Flappy Bird and 2048.
“The promise of infinite possibilities makes you want to keep putting things together to see if it really is as limitless as it sounds,” said Clody, 26. “It’s also a huge puzzle game where you try to get something.”
Infinite Craft, like Lego and Minecraft, doesn’t have a set gameplay, but players have invented mini-games that are as entertaining as an amusement park.
When Twitch streamer Will Neff hosted an Infinite Craft tournament with influencers like Hasan Piker, Ludwig Ahgren, and Valkyrie, they were the fastest to reach the creation of a randomized block (like in “Finding Nemo”) and the rainbow. We challenged each other to create all the colors. . Other YouTubers paradoxically recorded themselves attempting to speedrun the never-ending game. There’s a Discord community out there trying to find the recipes needed to create all the characters of a particular fandom.
“It’s a lot of fun to experiment and error,” said Fulmer, who has created every character in the Super Smash Bros. universe.
This vast adaptability is what makes the game exciting for so many people, making it feel as if it’s a collaborative project being built in real time. A publicly available spreadsheet contains more than 10,000 lines of his recipes for everything from movie titles to “Bill Nye Meth.”
One Discord community discovered enough Japanese characters to play the entire game in another language.
“That’s the great thing about AI gaming,” Agarwal says. “We can set some basic rules, but we don’t know how far we can go.”
