ChatGPT and Video Games: How AI is Affecting the Future of Gaming

Can a robot help you be a better gamer? Can it help you design your own video game? How gamers are using ChatGPT in 2023.

People are doing a lot with ChatGPT, Open AI’s AI chat system that can perform basic queries by scouring the Internet for answers to questions to compile a concise answer for the asker. ChatGPT is free and widely available and, ultimately, incredibly useful for most people. You can use ChatGPT to spruce up your resume, to come up with activities for your child’s birthday party, to write a poem or short story for a loved one and so much more. In short, ChatGPT can help you complete tasks more quickly than you imagined and with the entire internet’s collective knowledge, to boot. 

While teachers and professors around the country and the world try to figure out who is cheating on their papers with AI and who isn’t, gamers are using ChatGPT in their own way to enhance their gaming experience and expertise. Gamers can use ChatGPT in a number of ways to increase their presence and productivity in the gaming world. If, like me, you’re wondering how gamers can use ChatGPT to further their on-screen performance, read on!

ChatGPT and gamers

Using ChatGPT to improve play

Some of the ways in which ChatGPT can benefit gamers might be obvious. For example, a player could ask AI how to be a specific level in game or if there are any codes to earn new virtual items within a game. For gamers who want a new challenge to tackle, ChatGPT can scour the internet to find recommendations based on a gamer’s current preferred games. ChatGPT can even be used to play text-based role playing games with users who are looking for a playmate.

Eventually, AI will likely be able to be used to help enhance NPCs, or non-player characters. Non-player characters are, at present, merely characters who perform a simple task within a game, such as provide clues to players as they try to solve a problem and advance their position within the game. However, developers will soon be able to enhance NPCs with programs such as ChatGPT to give players a more robust gaming experience that is more personalized and engaging. 

Using ChatGPT to help recreate old games or create new ones

Right now, though, gamers can use ChatGPT to create new games and learn how to code games they may want to create or enhance. For example, a gamer who loves the game of Tetris, can enhance the classic game with the help of AI, according to this article from Polygon. ChatGPT can help a gamer go back and revisit the original code that created the game and add tweaks to enhance this game or other classic games that aren’t as advanced as those commonly played today.

ChatGPT can also help generate code to create a new video game at a gamer’s request. This can be especially exciting for gamers who are hoping to enhance their knowledge by learning to code and possibly becoming a game developer. They can have AI write the code for a game and then try to play it, working with AI to rewrite code that isn’t working or functioning properly. Learning to code and correct broken code and essential to being a successful video game developer, and programs such as ChatGPT can be a great, free resource that helps would-be develops get their start.

ChatGPT: limitations in gaming

Although AI programs can help write the code to create a video game, ChatGPT can’t actually play a video game. Yet, anyway. Video games still require a human at the helm, giving the on-screen avatar commands and directions that control its actions. ChatGPT also can’t create anything from scratch, it can merely pool resources it finds around the web. So, it can write a code to move an avatar around a screen based on a gamer’s instructions, but it can’t actually move the avatar. And it can tweak the code for Tetris based on a combination of user command and info found on the web, but it can’t inherently figure out how to recode Tetris.

The future of ChatGPT and other similar AI programs is both exciting and a bit nerve-wracking. As much as AI can currently enhance the human experience, it can’t replicate it. Yet. ;)