Dementia Minecraft? What Is Oasis, The New AI Video Game?
November 4, 2024
Imagine walking down into a cave in Minecraft, only to then suddenly find yourself above ground in a village the very instant that you turn around. That's basically your average experience in Oasis, the first playable AI-generated game.
For those who haven't gotten the chance to play it yet, Oasis is really weird. It plays like nothing else that exists. It has been dubbed "dementia Minecraft", and it's hard to see it as anything else. But what exactly is Oasis under the hood, and why is it trying to be Minecraft, of all things?
AI-Generated Realtime Gameplay Is Still In The Works
Oasis is the first playable, realtime, open-world AI model. That's a very wordy description, but basically it all just means that everything in the currently playable game is generated by AI. User input generates reactions. Graphics, gameplay, and physics, all of those things are accounted for when you try to walk, jump, or break a block.
If you're wondering why Oasis plays like the concept of Minecraft, that's because Oasis has been trained on a subset of open-source Minecraft video data collected by OpenAI. Presumably, Minecraft was chosen due to its mixture of simple graphics with sufficiently complex gameplay.
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Outputting video is nothing easy for something like this, especially at a playable framerate. Trying out Oasis, it definitely feels awkward, but its visuals are impressive for what it is, nonetheless. It definitely takes getting used to, though.
You also just need to accept the fact that Oasis isn't defined by logic in the way that every other game is. Nothing about the world you're in is permanent. That's where the "dementia" aspect of the game comes in. Things appear and disappear in an instant. There is no definite reality. It's fun to explore and experiment with, but this definitely wouldn't work as a standalone experience. That said, all the knowledge behind this project could be used to make something unique and amazing, so there's plenty to look forward to.
Oasis is more of a proof of concept than a fully developed video game. It was meant to be enjoyed as the weird little project that it is. Probably not to the extent that it has reached, though. All things considered, the attention doesn't hurt. There's lots of potential here. It's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
