Making social games into a live performance is so delightful. Why?
After overseeing hundreds of shows for Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets and having won several awards from critics and fans, I have an insight into why our performer-driven escape room game is so delightful. We’re benefitting from AI fatigue.
I grew up playing video games, and the non-player characters that lived inside those game worlds, NPCs for short, responded to my actions in preprogrammed ways using AI magic tricks. I ate it up! There was something so powerful about feeling immersed in a world that responded to me, even if the responses might have been simple and predictable. The illusion of cause and effect through state machines and decision trees made me feel seen.
Like any magic trick, as the novelty fades, the illusion can lose its power. So over the last few decades, game developers have gotten better and better making more sophisticated ways of predicting inputs and generating responses from AI-driven characters.
But game AI is about to hit a serious wall. Next-gen players grew up as digital natives, developing their social skills by hanging out in social games. They can easily spot the difference between programmed characters and real people. Beautifully crafted (and expensive to make!) games like Cyberpunk 2077 are landing flat on audiences that would prefer playing simpler social games like Among Us & Roblox.
What we are building at Adventure Lab brings games to life in a completely new way. Our live performers truly invite our players into our worlds and characters, and our players feel seen and heard in a much deeper way than they do when interacting with AI.
When watching Dr. Crumb’s School for Disobedient Pets, my favorite moment is when a player thinks Chief or Dr. Crumb is an AI-driven NPC, and then freaks out when one of our performers comes back with a witty or topical callback that defies expectations of what computers can do. That’s when they realize what they’re playing is more than a game, it’s a performance!
