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A new era of computer gaming?

One of the very first games that saw me glued to a computer for more than 8 hours was Adventure.

No fancy graphics, no multi-voice synthesized sound, no haptic feedback joysticks -- just man versus machine (and its programmer).

This was truly addictive stuff -- perhaps because all the visuals were created in your own mind by your own imagination and perhaps because this was in an era when home computers were still new and novel.

Whatever the reason, this was fascinating and addictive stuff.

Move on almost 50 years and things have changed a lot.

Now we have photorealistic realtime graphics (ironically powered by an "Unreal Engine") which harness the power of billions of GPU transistors to immerse us in a make-believe world of first-person shooters, flight simulation or race-driving, all from the convenience of our own home.

However, I still have a soft spot for those old text-based 8-bit adventure games so I thought I'd use my local AI LLM (Gemma4 running on an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5) to try and relive those halcyon days.

I asked it:

It responded with:

I then typed:

It's response was delightful:

Yes, that's right... I was playing a text based Adventure game once again.

How cool is this?

I played on for a few minutes and although its responses were pretty slow (due to the very limited speed of the Raspberry Pi), it was fun and do-able.

It was about this time I realised that maybe there is a huge potential for the use of AI LLMs in computer gaming.

Imagine a game where you are battling an unpredictable AI opponent which has a multi-billion parameter training dataset on which to call. Suddenly, strategy games become far more engrossing because you're not just fighting against a fixed algorithm but against a real AI that is far more capable.

Alternatively, imagine a game where you have an AI side-kick who learns as the game progresses and becomes increasingly capable of defending your flanks or providing valuable advice.

I think this may be the next phase of computer gaming. We already have photorealistic graphics that run at 100FPS or better and it strikes me that one FPS game is much like the next -- but once you throw some really capable AI into the mix, a whole new genre of game could come out of it.

Back in the 1970s and early 1980s I was an avid computer gamer but kind of dropped out of it once 3D graphics became the norm. I think Castle Wolfenstein and Doom were probably the last games I spent any time playing. I'm more of a strategy-gamer than a shoot-em-up guy -- although I did have some fun with some 80's and 90's era retro-games a while back.

The ability for this LLM on my Pi to create effectively infinute Adventure scenarios and return me to the wonderful days of text-based games has rekindled my interest and perhaps we'll see game makers also embrace the opportunity to create wholely new offerings that challenge the mind as much as the reflexes.

Carpe Diem folks!

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