Hidden Door is an AI storytelling game that actually makes sense

Years before ChatGPT jump-started the generative AI wave, OpenAI technology powered a game called AI Dungeon 2 that essentially let you improvise an open-ended, anything-goes story with an AI narrator. Hidden Door, a new platform that’s now in early access, also lets you cowrite a choose-your-own-adventure-style story with AI. But this narrator won’t let you do whatever you want — in fact, that’s a lot of the appeal.

Hidden Door is designed to let you play in worlds that include the public domain settings of the Wizard of Oz and Pride and Prejudice as well as The Crow, which Hidden Door has licensed. You create a character, fill in a few details about their backstory, and write in notable traits. The system gives you an opening scenario, and you respond, similar to a tabletop player with a game master. For some decisions, a behind-the-scenes dice roll will decide whether you succeed or fail; either way, the story proceeds from there.

Image: Hidden Door

I was given access ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, and for one story, I chose a variation of Pride and Prejudice called “Courtship and Crimson,” which means there are vampires. I told Hidden Door that I was a vampire hunter that’s driven by “an uncompromising sense of duty and a thirst for vengeance,” and the game threw me into a social event where I immediately spotted what I thought was a vampire. There were some prepopulated options, but I wrote my own — to immediately attack the potential enemy with a weapon — and the game let me do so. (It turns out the “vampire” was an illusion!)

While playing, you’ll collect cards with things like characters and locations that you can look back on as a refresher for key parts of your story. The narrator also has a deck of cards with plot points you can occasionally pick from to guide where you want the story to go.

Where Hidden Door differs from a general-purpose chatbot is that it will create in-universe limits on what you write. With ChatGPT, for example, I asked it to create its own version of Pride and Prejudice and vampires. Then, I wrote that I had a magical, unbeatable bow with silver arrows. ChatGPT let me generate it without any hesitation and let me use it to quickly defeat every vampire on Earth and eventually the galaxy. It’s not precisely “unrealistic” (since vampires aren’t real), but it short-circuited any kind of challenge or satisfying narrative. With Hidden Door, when I tried to pull a similar trick, the game stopped me and gently encouraged me to try and strike up a conversation to gather information instead.

Sometimes it felt like Hidden Door was simply limiting my options, though. In a Wizard of Oz instance, I tried to make the “daring,” “danger addict” reporter that I was playing get in an apparently hypnotized porter’s face, sending repeated instructions to throw a punch or grab them. The game gave me a “you failed” message. It might have been pure (and unusual) bad luck on dice rolls. But even when things go well, I feel like I can sense the strings pulling the stories in a specific direction instead of letting me spend too long with random characters.

It would be one thing if this resulted in a genuinely great narrative, but the storytelling can feel disjointed. So far in my testing, each story feels like a series of sometimes entertaining beats guided firmly by the AI narrator behind the scenes. In one scene in my vampire story, an orchestra conductor continued feeding me information to set up a mysterious plot thread — even as I had my character pay basically no attention to him and instead focus on stabbing and killing a vampire version Lady Catherine. In a live tabletop game, there’s also the added camaraderie of bullshitting with your friends; going back and forth with an AI just isn’t the same.

Hidden Door’s character creator. Image: Hidden Door

The game has some rough edges. The narrator’s thinking can take a long time, often many seconds, and while waiting for something to happen, I would often get distracted and click away from the tab. A few times in my vampire story, the game also seemingly copied and pasted an extensive description of my sibling into the text, including an errant misplaced period.

Still, a focus on familiar narrative worlds could make Hidden Door a compelling way for some people to interact with an AI storyteller. Unlike rolling your own story with a chatbot from a big AI company, Hidden Door doesn’t let you just break all the rules to instantly win, so you have to work within the logic of each story as you’re playing (even if that logic involves vampires or the magical world of Oz). And the platform’s usage of public domain and licensed works means (theoretically) that the stories you’re playing through aren’t violating any sort of copyright infringement. Hidden Door says, “Most authors we work with are deeply involved in the creation process.”

The best thing that I can say about Hidden Door? Even though I have my problems with that vampire hunter story, I’m intrigued about what happens next.

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