WordPlayer: Wildermyth Lays Bare the False Promises of AI Storytelling

The human touch is telling

WordPlayer: Wildermyth Lays Bare the False Promises of AI Storytelling
Source: SUPERJUMP.

It took me a while to notice that Wildermyth credits its writers at the top of each story scene. When you hit one of its procedural story moments - presented across a series of comic-like panels, with characters from your current party subbed into the pre-configured narrative beat -  you're given a title for the scene, with the author or authors listed directly under it. The story you are seeing is unique: the scenario is pre-written, but it will change slightly each time depending on the characters in your party, the relationships they've formed, the personalities you have chosen for them, the journeys they've already been through, and the other interactions they've had so far. There are many variables that can change scenes dramatically, yet these stories are authored experiences, written by people, and designed for heavy variability. 

Wildermyth is a strategic turn-based RPG that layers on a procedural storytelling system, making each playthrough unique. You pick three initial starting characters, choosing their appearance, preferences and traits,  then take them through one of the game's stories. Each tale will have certain unchanging points at the beginning and end of each "chapter"; however, the procedural variability comes from the journey between those points, and the different decisions characters may make at these various junctures. You'll see your characters fall in love, form rivalries, become injured and die, grow old, retire, become cursed, change forms, and live different lives, based on the choices you made when you designed them and at various other points throughout each campaign. The destination might be predetermined, but the journey is all on you.

Source: Steam

By the end of a run, characters have lived entire lives within the scope of the story

Wildermyth is like a series of lengthy collaborative tabletop RPG adventures, but boiled down to a few hours and with just one player guiding them. As you venture around the node-based world map, uncovering new locations, battling enemies, and completing objectives, you'll stumble across a mix of smaller, contained tales while pursuing the bigger narrative. During these smaller stories, you'll make choices that impact how things play out, which might determine the lives and fates of your characters.

By the end of a run, characters have lived entire lives within the scope of the story, and their personal narratives are a mix of your choices, several predetermined events, and the actions you've made as a player.

It's difficult to design for variability, to make players feel like their choices matter to the larger narrative. It's even more difficult to design a story where you can substitute different characters entirely, give them their own personal, unique stories and circumstances, and still have the larger narrative make sense, more or less. The challenge is felt in Wildermyth - it's not seamless or without friction, and the plots that unfold across a session aren't always easy to follow. But it's a marvelous piece of design, a rare kind of co-authored experience where, by the end of a run, you feel that you and the designers have worked in tandem to make something unique and interesting.

Wildermyth, then, is built around a version of narrative crafting that proponents of AI storytelling tools always claim they will be capable of doing. Imagine, they say, a game where you can invent any characters you want, put them into the story framework of your choice, let it go, and a story will be written around them. Characters will deliver dialogue that is crafted on the fly, which is indistinguishable from an expertly scripted scenario. You'll be able to come up with an idea and make it happen in seconds, giving players infinite stories, they claim.

Source: Steam

It's a false promise, of course. Even in a hypothetical world where an AI can tell stories and craft dialogue that is on par with the best writing humanity has to offer, it would still be worthless - the value in storytelling has always been the way it connects readers, players, viewers and listeners to human experience. So far all we have are tech demos of deeply uninteresting NPCs that can be talked to endlessly despite having nothing of value to say, with a promise that entry level jobs are going to dry up because executives can't imagine why it might be worth hiring someone with a sense of humour to write the NPC barks that players will hear endlessly for the entire 30 hour runtime of their upcoming open world game. 

Endless possibilities are boring. Defined borders that can be poked at, limitations that can be explored, carefully crafted, hyper-specific exchanges that can be uncovered - that's the juice. That's where you feel the unique, special relationship with the designers, where you can see them anticipate your actions and reward you with an interesting exchange, a fun moment, something that was designed by people to be found by other people. Wildermyth is a game largely about exploring those borders; seeing how the writers anticipated the possibilities of the choices you might make and how they deliver it is thrilling.

I've spent the last few years being a grump - perhaps even a scold - about the current state of the loose collective of businesses, practices and software we've come to refer to as "AI." If someone poses a question to ChatGPT in front of me, I tell them I have no interest in the answer it gives them, and if someone shows me a piece of art they generated, I have no qualms telling them that I think the work has no intrinsic value.

Source: Steam

There's never any doubt that what I'm playing is the result of human ingenuity and wit

I understand that the hardline view I'm taking is increasingly unpopular, and many people, even those who think these tools are fundamentally dangerous, have clauses by which they think these tools are useful or good within their own lives. As a writer, I know that AI can't ever replace what I do, but I also know that using AI to generate text is an awfully appealing option for anyone looking to save the money they might have otherwise spent hiring me. As always, the river of shit flows right into the ocean of capitalism (the one body of water that seemingly won't suffer from the environmental damage AI is contributing to). 

Perhaps my grumpiness has made me like Wildermyth even more than I would have if I'd played it when it first launched on PC a few years ago. Each expedition in this game is a handcrafted quilt made up of a lot of different patches, all designed expertly to fit together in a way that will look coherent and feel cohesive when you look the quilt over. There's never any doubt that what I'm playing is the result of human ingenuity and wit, a team that has dedicated itself to giving its players a good, unique, authored narrative experience each time. Because there were real, human writers behind it, the game can surprise me, too. I can be caught off guard by what a person managed to come up with, or a contingency that the designers planned for, in a way I wouldn't in a game with infinite possibilities. 

The writers on Wildermyth crafted stories without knowing, exactly, who the characters players created and brought into those stories would be. It means that when they wrote a romance plot, they didn't know who was falling in love; when they wrote a storyline about an evil wizard who tricked one of my characters, they couldn't know who would be tricked. When one character was injured and chose to flee the battle, losing a leg instead of their life, there were scripts for both scenarios that followed. The character's rival begrudgingly put their conflict aside to assure them they were making the right choice. After the battle, another member of the party confessed their love to that character, seeing now that they might lose them at any time (I had my newly wounded archer accept their marriage proposal - I'm worried about whether both characters will make it to retirement). 

Source: Steam

That's a lot of variables to plan for, but there's a fundamental element underpinning all of this storytelling - a core understanding of humanity. Only a person knows what it feels like to fall in love with another person, or to embarrass themselves in front of someone they want to impress, or the keen sting of being betrayed, could craft these tales. You don't need to see the writer's names to know the story scenes in Wildermyth were written by real human beings; if they hadn't been, there'd be no game worth discussing at all.