3/28/2024

11/20/2024 5:16 PM

4

0

1 win / 0 losses

Warden

The Grindy Adventure

unpublished

It's a Saturday evening in late 1987 in the suburbs of Vienna. You are a 16-year old school boy looking for some fun. But your main secret agenda lies elsewhere. You're fond of rechargeable batteries, so your current obsession is to convince everyone of using rechargeable batteries. It's been discussed in class that some parties are going to take place tonight in the green buildings north of Gerasdorfer Straße, so you go out for the evening trying to have some fun. Who knows, maybe you'll meet someone who you'll be able to convince of the advantages of rechargeable batteries on the way? The geography and the streets mentioned really exist in Vienna, also the persons appearing in the game are modeled after real persons I knew or still know, the way they were back then when we all went to school. The events mentioned mostly really took place as well.

Yeah, that's what I have in mind. I also use the AI as some kind of "common sense generator" since I know now that my battery obsession back then was somewhat out of the norm. Of course, everybody has some traits off the norm, otherwise life would be far to boring. The reason why I started having the AI written chapters was actually the question "What can reasonably happen after this and that happened, and what are some options the player might have". But yes, the AI writing became too different from my own style, and it became stereotypical if you let it go on for too long and accepted that there are parks, girls and cafes everywhere they shouldn't be. By now, I've already eradicated some of the AI written stuff and replaced it by my own, and I'm going on doing that until all stuff directly written by AI is gone... except for the exceptions already stated above.

Influenced? I'm not sure if I can completely eradicate AI influence from my storygame... because I'm constantly working with AI models and video generators. I will try to make sure there will be no AI-generated text in the storygame itself when it gets published, though there may be an option here and there I can't spot which was originally proposed by an AI model and I went with that proposal because I thought it would make sense within my story. These are only the options given to the player, however, not the main text of the chapters, and it would be only a few that fit so well that in hindsight it's difficult to spot them even for me. Then there are a few chapters influenced, but not written by AI. This is when you get into the "lower Justgassen buildings" and the originally planned version was one old woman sitting on a bench, inviting you to come up to her flat for coffee. However, as an experiment I tried to generate this chapter as a video in Lumalabs, and it created something different... instead of a man coming up to that woman on the bench, another woman comes in walking from the right and the man shakes that woman's hand instead of greeting the woman on the bench as initially planned. And when I extended that video, more hilarious things occurred. There I got the idea that these alternate outcomes would be good food for additional options in the storygame, but I wrote them and the chapters following them myself, depicting what happened in that wrongly generated video. However, the chapters continuing the story after the depiction of the video (other than the original one where you come along with the woman on the bench) are AI-generated, and that's what definitely will be eradicated and, probably, shortened a lot to resolve matters pretty quickly. Then there are two songs. Throughout the story, several songs play at a party, or from a boombox, or in the disco, and for each song there is a Youtube link in the respective chapter so that you can listen to that song while playing. Most of the songs are commercially released songs, but there are two that are AI generated... one is called "The grindy adventure" and it's supposed to be the title song of the story game. I don't know if I'll keep that one in though because it's a bit off compared to the general mood of the game, since it depicts the city of Vienna as something exciting, at least in the game, and that's not really the mood the game depicts if you play it. And the lyrics are the typical AI stuff... you know it if you've seen some AI generated song lyrics. It would probably fit in if every chapter was AI generated, but that's definitely not what I wanted to do, and since I'm removing all the AI stuff now, the song fits even less than before. The other song is called "Space Dog" and was created independently of my storygame. It contains more of a human element since I also wrote part of the lyrics, and then I also made a Youtube video for it, using Lumalabs and other AI powered generators, but I literally prompted every 5-second snippet of it and only left in the parts that fit into my vision for the music video. There are a few references to this song in the storygame... one is a link to it when it plays in a disco the player can visit, and then in the Prater there's a ride called "Space Dog" which is a simulator of a ride through space. I'll have to rewrite the chapter describing this ride though, because it was also AI generated. The third reference is when Space Dog himself appears in the "Silent Bull", and this one will definitely be removed since all of the "Silent Bull" substory is AI generated and not part of my original vision for the story. I hope you're pleased with this. If not, well, it's at least easy to replace "Space Dog" by a different, actually released song playing in the disco, and to remove the option to ride the "Space Dog" ride from the Prater visit in my storygame. And I could also remove the additional options from the Lower Justgassen Buildings, though I would actually rather leave them in, only eradicating all the AI written stuff associated with them.

OK, thank you for your feedback. I think I will do it the way you described. The first 300 chapters seem to be pretty clear of AI stuff, after that the waves start rising... I've cleared the first four chapters yesterday and will continue to do so. This will have the consequence of whole storylines disappearing which have been invented by the AI models, but are not grounded in reality, like the thing with Mrs. Schmidt, the grandmother of Eddie who lives on Kollarzgasse, and who is a fundraiser for St. Stephen's cathedral. Or the thing where, if you try to just pass the fast train underpass near Siemensstraße station, you end up riding the subway to Rathaus station which is several miles away. Consequently, the whole storyline following that (the options what to do near Rathaus) will go away or will later be connected differently, in a way that makes more sense, however, nearly all of those chapters are pretty much AI generated, so they will have to be rewritten or scrapped anyway. Another thing to go is the "Silent Bull" building to the south of Mitterhofergasse, with the host Sebastian and the "Midnight Symphony" taking place, and Anna and Alice living there, all of which don't exist there in reality. This will probably be replaced by something much smaller in scope... maybe you won't even be able to get into that building as a player anymore. I will probably start a list of chapters which are abandoned and can be used for something else because the link leading to them was from a page where something AI generated happened, and if that doesn't happen anymore nearly the way it was written by the AI, the follow-ups don't make sense either, like the above example with Rathaus station.

Hi there! This is my first post on this forum, and I'm in the process of creating my first storygame on this site, which I've now been working on for a few months. It's not published yet because it's unfinished, but you can try playing the unfinished version by going to my profile. Now the reason I actually started with this is I had a version of this storygame in German on paper, hand-written in a book, which I wrote over the course of many boring lessons back at school when I was a teenager. I didn't know too much about storygames back then, but I had tried some adventure games on home computers popular at that time, mainly the Commodore 64. Then, it must have been around February or March 1988, I visited another class while most other classmates went on a school ski course, and in that class, one of them had a "real" storybook. I looked briefly into it to grasp the concept, and then I started writing my own. However, the concept I grasped was just that that the "input" was just picking one of several options given at the end of a chapter by reading the chapter belonging to that option next. However, I was used to what computer text adventures looked like, and they always gave pretty short descriptions of the room since the whole adventure usually had to fit in 64K of storage (at most), and you could only display 1000 characters on screen, so the description of one room rarely exceeded that. I based my storygame around the suburbean area I knew where most things in my life were happening, and I concentrated on what happened outside my family, especially with class- and schoolmates. I think there are around 40-50 locations on the street in my original book which can be visited in an open-world fashion by moving in the given direction, and from there you can enter various inns and parties which can be viewed as small sub-stories which work more like a storybook does. At the end of such a sub-story, either the adventure ends, or you get thrown back to an outside location. In some locations, people walk by, and you can join them causing you to be taken to a different location, usually a venue or a party. Now the "characters" in that book are basically some of my classmates, friends from school, their parents, teachers and my step-grandmother... all people I really know. People I don't know just appear briefly, like the DJ at the "Sound Club" or the waitress at a venue. Sadly, that book never got finished... maybe it wasn't meant to be finished after all. The main objective of the player, the one you get points for, is persuading other people to use rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones, which out of today's view is pretty silly, but that's what I really tried to do and was even obsessed with back in 1987-1988. However, by 1989 I could feel some kind of backlash since I was getting on people's nerves with this. By then, I think, I was at chapter 280 of my book, and from there you can feel a bit of a change happening in that the chapters get a bit longer, and the topics get a bit more varied. However, I didn't manage to finish the book. I didn't have a strict plan at the start, instead I made it up as I went, and tried to figure out what han happen in this and that situation with the people I knew. Now, as I said, I didn't finish the book. I think the last chapter I wrote was No. 398, and it ends abruptly, however there are references to about 80 more chapters in that book which weren't actually written. For some of those references I can still figure out what was going to happen in them, but for some I can't remember what I had on my mind there. In addition to that, there was the concept of several "auxiliary" books which also hadn't been written. When you got out-of-bounds at the southern end, you got a reference to an auxilary book "Unter der Siemensstraße" (Under Siemensstraße), going to the west would lead you to the book "Strebersdorf" and so on... there was also a book called "House visits" you entered if you visited someone. As I said, those weren't written as well. Now the storybook on my account, "The Grindy Adventure" (which was also the original title), is an attempt to make a digital form of this storybook, but in English. However, I had the problem that the book wasn't finished, and for some unwritten chapters, I also couldn't remember what was going to happen in them. So I tried to write those with the help of AI large language models. But I proofread them in a way that ensures that they don't contain anything which doesn't adhere to the actual geography in Vienna. Some of the chapters are quite good, like what happens in the Vienna Prater, or what happens at a party when the stereo radio recorder is guarded by a skinhead and you try to change the music. But then the out-of-bounds chapters quickly devolve into something quite different... the AI invented parks and cafes where there are none, and additional characters which weren't planned at all, and it doesn't seem to come to any end. It even got worse when I also let the AI decide what the next options for the player should be. The result is that right now, I'm at chapters 1-724 actually written and references up to chapter 1062, which is probably much more than the average storygame has. And the AI keeps inventing things as it goes, additional characters like Anna which you can meet at Mitterhofergasse's "Silent Bull" and various actions in cafes which are in a completely different style than the interactions in the inns I originally wrote. If you get out of bounds, mainly, the book turns into a tour around Vienna, which wasn't initially planned that way at all. So I don't quite know how to bring this to an end. Should I scrap all those AI chapters and rewrite them in a way so that the story falls back on itself? Or should I keep some of the AI chapters in there? You can pretty much tell it's an AI chapter if it starts with "As...". ;-) It's grown far beyond a digital version of the initial storybook which I actually wanted to create. Have you any tips for me how to go on with this?