Water and fire make steam, steam and fire make an engine, steam and engine make a train.
sprawling across a conspiracy map that would make Charlie Kelly blush.
But how did one man possibly prepare for all these combinations?
But I think Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old developer based in New York, deserves an open mind.
With his broader body of work in view, it all makes even more sense.
Neal.fun is a tactile toybox, one so relentlessly jumbled that it almost eludes theme.
Infinite Craft feels like the final boss of Neal.fun.
It’s also his biggest and costliest project yet.
“It’s breaking even now, so that’s nice.
It’s not making money, but at least it’s not losing any.”
Money seems the simplest of Agarwal’s problems, as generative AI has proved quite the beast to wrangle.
“Sometimes you think it understands, and then it’ll make a combination that makes no sense.
Giving examples worked best.
I’m like ‘no, that’s not what I want!’
I went through hundreds of different prompts.
It was kind of like talking to a five-year-old.”
Like people, AI models have their own personalities, costs, and capabilities.
Finding the right model for Infinite Craft seemed more like hiring a candidate than choosing a tool.
“Some models were cheap and dumb.
Others were smart but would have bankrupted me.
I wonder if that flexibility is a double-edged sword.
This carte blanche appropriation also includes social media.
As it happens, when you feed an AI a million Tweets indiscriminately, the AI learns to discriminate.
Some models, like ChatGPT, follow strict safeguarding directives to sanitise their output.
But if ChatGPT is the teacher’s pet, Infinite Craft’s Llama 2 is the class clown.
Combining ‘Europe’ and ‘Cult’ creates ‘Vatican’.
Combining ‘Religion’ with itself creates ‘War’.
Surely its judgement must land Agarwal in hot water?
“All the time,” he laughs.
“I get emails from fandoms, religions, the list goes on.
I’m like, ‘I didn’t choose these combinations!'”
Suffice to say, Agarwal understands all too well that AI mimics our prejudices along with our speech.
Enforcing that awareness is easier said than done.
Eventually it doesn’t even feel like programming anymore.
It’s completely different to traditional game design where you have full control.”
Just as Agarwal struggles to control Llama 2, it often wrestles with the player for the steering wheel.
“It’s amazing.
I’ve seen people make drawings by arranging elements.
They essentially unlocked a new language inside the game.”
A prolific creator, Agarwal rarely dwells on one darling.
But Infinite Craft has a future, one the community’s creativity plays a critical role in.
“Since the game blew up to this level, so many people have sent me feature requests.
But also, the state it’s in now isn’t my full vision for the game.
There’s lots of routes you could take a game like this.
It’s easy to understand his reservations about lending structure to Infinite Craft.
The absence of guidance seamlessly guides us to explore our own curiosities.
That’s when I noticed that nearly every game on Neal.fun lacked objectives or resistance.
I’m nostalgic for the old Flash era.
I guess if the easiest thing is to stay in the walled garden, people will.”
You could draw a zebra, and the zebra would start walking around.
You could draw the sun, and it’d start spinning."
Yet his sincerity and enthusiasm only heighten the eeriness of the engine behind his creation.
Not a bone in my body doubts Agarwal.
After all, his game might be the most innocuous use of AI in the games industry to date.
