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About the Game

Spin a tale, Shape a world — AI-driven Storytelling Game

Start your journey in the ancient Persian Empire as the heroine Shahrzad, who can turn words into reality! To take revenge on the evil king, you'll need to tell stories that lead him to mention weapons, turning them into blades for your fight…

Full Intro - Official tone

"1001 Nights" is an AI native narrative game inspired by Wittgenstein's notion: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." In this game adapted from Persian folklore, the evil king Shahryar betrayed by his wife, marries a new maiden each day only to execute her the following morning. You, as Shahrzad, become his next bride. You can transform spoken stories from other people into tangible reality. Players need to strategically guide the evil King to narrate tales with weapon words, which in turn generate unique equipment based on the story. As these weapons are collected, the world in the story begins to invade the game's reality. Shahrazd will fight the king in the story world, with the weapons from their tales... Powered by generative AI (large language models and stable diffusion), this game hopes to explore the boundary of reality and fiction. Shahrzad seeks to reshape her destiny, challenging patriarchal norms. Players redefine the game's boundaries, crafting stories that surpass authorial constraints.

Full Intro - Chill tone

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"

This is a game about storytelling.

Inspired by the folktale collection "1001 Nights", this game follows the story of an evil king who, betrayed by his wife, marries a new maiden each day only to execute her the following morning. You, as Shahrzad, become his next bride. You possess the secret magic to turn language into reality... Can you end his reign of terror?

As the heroine Shahrzad, you have the magic that turns other one's language into reality! Guide the King (powered by AI) to mention weapons in his continuation, such as 'sword', 'knife', or 'shield' ... they materialize as weapons for you to fight the king!

The new reality from the tales will gradually emerge through cutting-edge AI large language models. Every story is unique between you and the King...

Key features

From Language to Reality driven by AI

Fueled by AI language models, witness your narrated tales metamorphose into visual realities, merging with the game's pixel art aesthetics.

Battle with Weapons from Your Tale

Each weapon collected from the story is unique based on your stories!
Use the weapons you collected to face and fight the King, in the story world that merged from your tales...

Challenge Traditional Norms of Folklore

Embody Shahrzad and defy ancient brutal patriarchal conventions…

Academic Foundations in Gameplay

"1001 Nights" isn't just a game; it's also an art and academic research project since 2020 based on GPT-2 (grandmother of ChatGPT). We've published two papers in the fields of AI and interactive storytelling during its development, which disclosed the behind system of the game.

History

The earliest version of the game was a demo created by the main developer Yuqian in 2020 as a master's course project, utilizing a fine-tuned GPT-2, well before the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Afterwards, the game was invited to participate in several art exhibitions. In 2021, as Yuqian began her PhD studies and AI technology advanced, the game transitioned to being powered by Dreamily.ai, a story-writing model, and the first paper on the game was published in 2022.

Due to the limitations of AI at that time, the game remained a small-scale experiment, unable to handle industry challenges like player input evaluation. However, the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the advancement of generative AI, especially large language models (LLMs), provided solutions to these issues. Consequently, Yuqian decided to further develop the game as an indie game, founding the team Ada Eden in early 2023 to explore the potential of AI in storytelling.

The game then transitioned to using contemporary LLM models, such as GPT-4, and incorporated visual generation in based on storytelling. This workflow was published in the second paper in 2023.

At the beginning of 2024, following Steam's policy changes regarding AI, "1001 Nights" launched its Steam page and was nominated for the A MAZE. Award.

About the Developer team “Ada Eden”

Currently, Ada Eden is a self-funded indie team without any funding or income from 1001 Nights.

“Ada Eden” is a group named after the pioneering programmer Ada Lovelace. We were established in early 2023 to progressively develop games and conduct research in the field of creative storytelling based on AI. The main members include Yuqian Sun (producer, art director, programmer and lead designer), lead programmer Artemy, assistant programmers, writers, musician and artists, collaborating remotely across China, UK and North America.

Videos

All available on google drive

https://youtu.be/theScfWHuXc?si=eSzCuI04XqTxklAN

https://youtu.be/0-f0hxZDG-Y?si=ZUDeT8vZ2I67nJm6

https://youtu.be/cp2H8d67vmg?si=Xy636NmqgX0-cnGS

Screenshots

All available on google drive

GIFs

All available on google drive

Logos

All available on google drive

Game logo

Team Logo

Game Icon

Awards & Recognition

Now Play This, London, UK - Official selection 2024

Sony Entertainment UK Demo Presentation - Official selection 2023

Gamescom, Cologne, Germany, 2023

WePlay - IndiePlay, Shanghai, China - Presented as Nominee - 2023

Book of Sand: Aiiiii Art Center, Shanghai, China - Invited - 2021

Awards

2022 Lumen Prize - Longlist in 3D/Interactives

2023 IndiePlay - Nominated for Best Innovation & Best Student Game

2024 A Maze Awards - Nominated for Explorer Award

Academic contributions

Presented in academic conferences:

DiGRA, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, 2024 (Upcoming)

Foundation of Digital Games (FDG), Athens, Greece, 2023

27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) Poster Session, Barcelona, Spain, 2022

Papers

V1 Paper (2022, Early version)

Y. Sun, X. Ni, et al., “Bringing Stories to Life in 1001 Nights: A Co-creative Text Adventure Game Using a Story Generation Model”, International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2022) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_42 Also available at ResearchGate

V2 Paper (2023, new version)

Y. Sun, Z. Li, et al.， “Language as Reality: A Co-Creative Storytelling Game Experience in 1001 Nights using Generative AI”， AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23) https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/27539

Please note: these two papers are over one and two years old, respectively. Therefore, there is definitely some discussion, especially regarding the ethical use of AI, that needs to be updated and improved.

AI Content Disclosure

As a pre-GPT game that started in 2020, the motivation behind this experimental game is to explore creative narrative gameplay based on conversational AI.

When we started this game as an art and academic project, our guiding principle was to use AI only to create novel gaming experiences that were previously impossible, not to replace human creativity in any way. Inspired by the ancient Persian folklore, the game's soul comes from us, the human creators, not the AI technology itself. AI is just the means by which this vision is brought to life and shared with you. As human artists and researchers, we hope this game serves as an example of how technology can be an actor, while human creators become the directors who shape it in artistic and innovative ways.

All main game assets are manually made by artists in the team, and only used AI visuals to assist minor components, e.g. far background sprite and carpet textures. Please see our press kit for the detailed credits.

The main mechanism is: You narrate stories to the King, who is powered by large language model (the LLM in our free trial is GLM, and you can also use GPT 3.5 or 4 to play the game), and he continues your tale. You must guide him to mention specific weapon keywords. Each weapon is unique, with descriptions generated based on the stories you and the King create together. As you collect more weapons, a world emerges within the story and on the weapon cards.

This real-time imagery is generated through Stable Diffusion based on the stories you tell. We make a conscious effort to avoid using specific artists' styles to prevent infringement, maintain a general style, and ensure transparency. The main goal is to bring the stories to life in real-time while keeping it consistent with the game's artstyle. This means we ensure the real-time generated images in our game won't be mistaken for those created by particular artists or be overly similar to any artist's style. The base model we use is Cheese Daddy, combined with Pixelization algorithm. These are all opensourced. The workflow is mostly explained in the academic papers we published.

Currently, we're a small and self-funded indie team without any funding or income for this project. We are awared that the stochastic and source-consuming generative AI technology still has ethical problems in terms of environment and authorship. With appropriate future funding and support, we aim to address and reduce potential harm from generative AI technologies. We welcome any concerns, suggestions, or questions about our AI-generated content and processes at [email protected]. Your feedback will help us improve and explore, and become more considerate.

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