"When They Came For Us": ChatGPT provides the answers in Peta's VR game
Peta wants to hold up a mirror to people with the VR game "When They Came For Us". The animal welfare organization also uses ChatGPT for this purpose.
"When They Came for Us" is controlled by the voice.
(Image: Peta)
The VR game "When They Came For Us", commissioned by the animal rights organization Peta, aims to hold up a mirror to humanity: The game character is abducted and held captive by overpowering aliens. She has seven minutes to convince the hostile aliens to release her again using good arguments.
In this way, Peta wants to make players aware of the brutality of factory farming, writes Peta Creative Director Christian Coslar in a press release. "With our immersive role-playing game, we want to encourage players to think about how we treat animals and learn about the vegan lifestyle as an easy way to make a positive change."
Alien as AI interlocutor
Peta's VR game, which is available free of charge in the Meta Store for the Facebook company's latest VR glasses, is also interesting from a technical perspective. Peta does not rely on ready-made dialog trees for the discussions with the aliens, but on the AI chatbot ChatGPT. Players speak their arguments into its microphone, ChatGPT processes the information and responds using speech synthesis.
It is a similar concept to what Studio Inworld is testing with its tech demo "Inworld Origins". Computer-controlled characters (NPCs) are "briefed" with a number of parameters as to what role they play in the game world and what knowledge they possess. Based on these inputs, they can then respond freely to any statements and questions from the players.
However, because systems such as conventional ChatGPT chats can be relatively easily reduced to absurdity, finished video games with real AI NPCs are still rare. The VR game "When They Came For Us" by Peta is therefore one of the first opportunities to have conversations with an AI character.
Free gameplay and different outcomes
The game was developed by the Hamburg-based creative agency Demodern, which uses the current ChatGPT 4o model for the AI responses. Because the AI reacts dynamically to players' statements, the developers promise a special depth of dialog and a completely free gameplay that allows for different outcomes.
"We can hardly imagine the suffering that sentient beings are exposed to every day in the animal industry," writes Peta Creative Director Christian Coslar. "That's why we have made it possible for people to experience a comparable situation using VR and AI. The only difference is that the users remain unharmed - unlike the billions of animals worldwide, for whom the circumstances shown are not a game, but bitter reality."
(dahe)
