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by the_af 237 days ago
> Here are responses that gemma 3 27b just came up with

I think nobody doubts an LLM can come up with responses. But can it understand when it should NOT respond? Can it reign in its baked-in impulse to be "helpful"?

Most of the responses Gemma gave you are not appropriate for many kinds of games. What if the tone of the game is, on purpose (authorial choice), to be "unhelpful"? Or what if it's meant to be helpful but ONLY if you previously unlocked something? [1]

And how can you keep consistency long term? LLMs have a tendency to go off the rails and forget context.

[1] There's an Interactive Fiction game, whose name escapes me now, where you're trying to communicate with a derelict spaceship, with one survivor. The parser is the survivor. For reasons I won't spoil, garbled communications and misunderstandings are part of the game. It's your mission to figure this out and what the survivor really wants. If the LLM becomes "helpful" in its replies, it will spoil the game!
2 comments
Tepix 237 days ago
If you give the LLM more context (i.e. the player's past actions) and some directions such as "don't make any suggestions", I think you can get good results. Yes, they may not always be perfect.

For the types of responses, needed long term context shouldn't be required.

Anyway, I noticed that on a standard laptop, getting a response from the Chrome Prompt API running Gemini nano takes a rather long time.

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the_af 237 days ago
I guess I'm skeptical you can steer current LLMs in this way, or at least, this hasn't been my experience.

I also worry not only about the loss of a shared experience among players, but also about the authorial voice... I find LLMs (even when prompted) tend to have an instantly recognizable style that I find unappealing.

Yes, all of this -- voice, tone, narrative direction -- could in theory be fixed with the right prompts, but I remain skeptical. From theory to practice seems such a long way...

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Tepix 237 days ago
Detritus, winner of the 2025 IF award

https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=l8tr8m9tlkgix1sk

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the_af 237 days ago
Hm, thanks for making me aware of this game, but that's not the game I meant. The one I mean is probably at least 10 years old.
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