The online gaming sector is very much in the hands of technology. From powerful computers to super-fast internet connections, the latest technology has helped to create a fantastic online gaming environment. As technology continues to advance, there are some pieces of tech which may not directly be linked to online gaming but could have an impact on the sector, such as software like ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is a natural language generation machine learning model. It can complete a variety of tasks at an extremely high level, including answering questions, producing humanlike responses, performing calculations, summarising text, conducting conversation, and writing both fiction and non-fiction content using prompts. Such is the humanlike nature of the responses from ChatGPT, universities and colleges are already raising concerns about how it can be used by students. Some schools and colleges have already banned the use of ChatGPT but how could it be used by the online gaming sector?
Producing Games
ChatGPT is already capable of producing games. The games are not complex but it can use JavaScript, C, and Python to create simple games, which is an exciting prospect. Anyone can use ChatGPT to create text based games and many people like to play text games on mobile devices, so we could see many new text based games available for mobile. At the time of writing, ChatGPT is not capable of producing complex online games, such as sports games, open world adventure games, or online pokies. For online game developers, using software like ChatGPT could enable the automation of many tasks and speed up the process of creating online games. Using this type of software could see online games being developed faster and at lower cost. However, it could mean the loss of jobs if tasks previously completed by humas are automated.
Online Gaming Characters
Could we see online games introducing characters based on ChatGPT and what would they be like? Characters in current online games that are non-human controlled have a specific set of actions they can carry out within the confines of the game. The actions can often appear random but they are still set within a framework and the character cannot move out of that framework. By using characters based on software like ChatGPT, the responses of the character could be completely different every time depending on the input by the player. How you interact with the character will have a massive influence on their response and that would be huge for the online gaming sector.
There has been much discussion regarding the consciousness of AI systems like ChatGPT and if they might have their own feelings. If there could be a sentient mind behind the software, it opens the door to realism in online games the likes of which we have never seen before. Characters in games with sentient minds is a mind-blowing thought and it would change the video gaming world. However, that is some way off and for now and software like ChatGPT is more likely to be used to create online games and for assistance during game play.