Thoughts on “Metagames” & AI
Classically, a “metagame” represents any “gameplay” external to the primary game, usually involving strategies and tactics that yield advantages within the primary game.
The simplest example in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games is the way players discover optimizations of character skills/classes/builds not specifically documented or intentionally designed by the developers that optimize PvE or PvP performance — and then spread & coordinate the information via forums/chat outside the game.
In Web3, the most common example is the emergence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) to create new layers of gameplay based on digital assets. Most of this is predicated on legitimizing what was once relegated to the “grey markets” of Real Money Trading (RMT) in MMOs, by allowing players to buy/sell/trade digital assets that might yield in-game benefits or improved social status.
Now, in AI, we’re starting to see developers playing metagames with ChatGPT, such as the work done recently by LangChain with their “BabyAGI with Tools” (based on the work of Yohei Nakajima) that can take OpenAI’s prompt system and create Autonomous Task Agents that “tell the prompt to design more prompts” and then recursively fulfill discovery assignments while doing live Google searches.
That’s right: the community of AI devs is treating ChatGPT (and the underlying GPT 3.5-turbo and GPT 4 APIs) the same way MMO players treat games.
This month’s metagame? Autonomous Task Agents w/ Live Lookup.
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About the Author
Tim “Draconi” Cotten is a startup founder with two decades of experience in enterprise software, blockchain, and MMO game development.
Once upon a time he was the lead game designer of Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss, and when he’s not writing up stories from the wild west days of online gaming he’s working on applying all those hard-won lessons to his Metaverse startup: Scrypted.
Oh, and he made Picturdle! Can you figure out the daily picture puzzle?
Talk about it on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CottenIO/status/1646147377613668352
#ai #gamedev #openai #community #metagame #chatgpt #chatgpt4
