Wiring a chatbot to dialogue is less interesting to me than the possibility of AI directing scenes and orchestrating reactivity across multiple characters. A reasoning model can ensure that the world responds to the player in a reasonable and narratively interesting way, without having to script everything or make individual characters particularly intelligent.
We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.
Wasn't this the goal of the Director AI in Left 4 Dead?[1] Monitoring player progress (or lack of it) and tailoring how zombies and items spawned outside of script events, and in L4D2 how the map, pathing, and weather worked in order to maximize tension or encourage progress?
Years ago when I was a bit obsessed about the Holy Grail of a living & breathing CRPG world the approach that seemed most promising to me then was having an expert system style AI module running on top of the complex but mechanical and boring low level simulation. This GM module would then find and tie together predefined hierarchical abstract patterns from the engines event log, adding some narration and meaning to it all and slightly nudging things along to some hopefully more interesting and meaningful paths.
I have been thinking that the current LLMs might actually make something like this more feasible, a kind of an GM in a Chinese Room that translates game events in to potential narrative arcs that the player is then free to follow if they wish. As the LLM's actions would be both inspired and limited by the game engine this would probably also tone down the problems with hallucinations and slop.
We're used to thinking of game AI as a property of the entity it's attached to (the NPC, the enemy, the opposing player) but an LLM can sit above that, more like a dungeon master.