Paradise: An Experiment Extending the Ensemble Social Physics Engine with Language Models
Jack Kelly, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip–Fruin · 2024
In this paper, we perform a postmortem of Paradise, a prototype game we built to explore the potential of using a social simulation to structure language model-driven gameplay. We describe our experience using the Ensemble social physics engine and extending its architecture with GPT-3. We detail our resultant hybrid simulation system, in which the simulation state informs generated dialogue, and generated dialogue informs the simulation state. We note that authoring behavior for this system was unmanageable, entailing an unstable balancing act between prompt engineering, the Ensemble social model, and the mapping between the two. We conclude by sharing our reflections on what we learned from the project; we hope this postmortem will be valuable to others researching social physics and language models in games.