The first completely AI-generated video game is incredibly strange and fun

Surely you already know minecraftwhich remains extraordinarily popular even a decade after its release, thanks to a unique blend of quirky gameplay and open-world building possibilities.

Well now there is an imitation, called Oasiswhich was released last month, and captures much of the flavor of the original game with a notable and strange twist. The game is not generated traditionally by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that creates each frame.

Oasis was created by an Israeli AI company called Decart, in collaboration with Etched, a company that designs custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized to power ‘transformer’ based AI algorithms.

Oasis uses an AI model by transformersimilar to the one that powers a large language model (LLM), only trained, it seems, with endless examples of people playing Minecraftto “invent” each new video frame in response to the previous one and user input, such as clicks or mouse movements. mouse. Oasis is similar to a video generation model like Sora, but the user can control the output.

artificial surrealism

Oasis can be played online for free, and Its exploration is fascinating and surreal.. In addition to housing strange artifacts, such as deformed cattle and stairs that go nowherethe game has an amazing quality, similar to that of inception. Since each frame is generated based on what the AI ​​model “imagines” should come after the frame it currently sees, the game world is never completely stable. It changes and transforms with a little push. If you look too closely at a texture, for example, when you look up again, the blocky world in front of you may be completely different from the one you saw last time.