Glimpses of the future often emerge at the Game Developers Conference. It’s where indie games generate a buzz or the kernel of a big idea is planted. This year, artificial intelligence took center stage as Nvidia showed off jaw-dropping capabilities of its chipsets and software companies such as Convai and Ubisoft revealed intriguing gameplay opportunities.

AI has been the source of hype and fear over the past year. It’s been at the center of labor conflict in Hollywood while in the tech industry companies see it as a way to improve efficiency. In the primordial tech ooze of video games, AI is set up to have a transformative impact on one part of the industry.

Enter Convay

Convai, a company that creates AI developer tools, offered a firsthand look through three projects. One was “Second Life,” where representatives showed how AI bots could act as guides for novice players. In a massively multiplayer online game, the nonplayable characters act almost like a concierge with more agency.

Players can ask them about locations and they can teleport them to new locales. They can generate surfboards on command so they can hang ten on a virtual beach. What’s notable is that the AI can not only answer questions but it knows the environment around it. The bot even has long-term memory so that it can recall places that players visited.

This raises privacy issues, but Convai said each bot has its own speaker profile and there’s no mixing of memories. Developers can also limit the memory by time so that it will forget.

“Stormgate” is an upcoming real-time strategy game from Frost Giant Studio, and in that demo, a character named Dr. Fletcher offered me a sitrep on what’s going on in the battlefield. This demo wouldn’t be in the game, but I could ask the NPC about the world and she would offer hints into the lore.

Project Neural Nexus impresses

By far the most impressive demo was “Project Neural Nexus,” it takes place in a cyberpunk world and throws players into a situation where a woman named Seraph has to guide players to the roof. That would be a normal scene in a video game that transitions to a bigger fight but wandering through the world, Convai officials urged me to talk with the inhabitants.

I chatted with them as I walked to the objective, learning more about the world, but I wanted to have a little more fun with it, so I asked one character if I could borrow some money, and they responded without a hiccup berating me. Later in the demo, Seraph handed me a gun and I asked what kind of weapon it was (It’s hard to tell with futuristic sci-fi weapons.) and she told me it was a submachine gun. It showed the characters also know about objects in the world as well as the general setting. Curious about her long hair, I asked where she got it cut and she told me she didn’t have time to have her hair done fighting the enemy.

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