Since the earliest days of humanity’s experiments with legal systems, we’ve been trying to find a way to make murder less appealing and trickier to pull off. Criminalising weapons, prison time, law enforcement—it turns out all we really needed was an extremely busy toilet.
In a talk on proc-gen narratives at AdventureX, Shadows of Doubt lead writer Stark Holborn shared one of her “favourite pieces of jank” from the detective sim’s development, where a toilet accidentally saved lives.
“Murders weren’t happening,” Holborn said, “and we couldn’t figure out why. And eventually we realised it was because the illegal weapon seller was the one place at night that had a toilet. And so there were all these AI citizens all trying to go to the toilet, and it was so busy that the killer could not get in to buy a weapon.”
When you solve crimes in Shadows of Doubt, these crimes have actually happened. The game’s not just telling you they did. The AI citizens go about their lives, go to work, go to shops, relieve themselves, and there are killers out there plotting their bloody crimes, stalking their victims, purchasing weapons, getting ready to do the dark deed.
So you’re not just being told stories—they have to play out first, or not play out, as was the case when a killer was thwarted by the bladders of AI citizens.
“This is what I mean when I say the game will create stories of its own in this amazing way,” said Holborn. “And you can’t always legislate for the fact that everyone’s going to need a wee at midnight.”
Holborn also touched on the ever-present spectre of generative AI. “When I talk about AI, when I talk about proc-gen systems, I think a lot of people—especially when they’re not from the games world—they assume I mean AI as in generative AI. They assume I mean LLMs, ChatGPT, stuff like that. And I don’t. Not at all. But a lot of people say to me, ‘OK, well Shadows is proc-gen, why didn’t you plug ChatGPT into it?’”
She gave her answer in the form of a gif of Jessica Fletcher (the world’s greatest detective) looking repulsed.
“I mean there’s a lot of reasons why we’re not going to plug ChatGPT in,” she added, "but one of the real reasons is that it’s hard enough legislating for an NPC who will say what and when and where to who without chucking just a whole bunch of spam into the mix.
“This is also a game where data integrity is really paramount. So if an LLM freaked out and gave a bad entry, it could just throw a whole player’s playthrough off. It could be a red herring, they might go down a path and then be really disappointed that actually the game’s just chucked them something completely random.”
It’s a helpful reminder that proc-gen games aren’t and shouldn’t just be AI free-for-alls; that even games which ostensibly generate stories themselves are only able to effectively do so because of all the hand-crafted elements created by human artists and writers.
You can watch all of Holborn’s talk on the AdventureX stream.
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