The Future Hits Text First
There is a lot of work being published on world models lately, most of which are trained on video game footage. And it is clear to me that the future of video games will take this form - extremely powerful simulations that allow one to interact in an infinite variety of environments.
Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) are a form of text-based online role-playing that were popular in the early 90s. I never played them as they were before my time, but I read a book about them called A Rape In Cyberspace. The book was a bit cringe as the author detailed some perhaps-too-revealing aspects of his roleplay experiences, but it did detail a sort of virtual reality that has yet to be equaled. And the titular rape (in which one user hacked another and then described his victim's character performing actions said victim would not have performed) was an interesting incident. Particularly interesting were the justice norms that the community agreed on - all of which took the form of in-universe retribution.
But I get off topic; the point here is MUDs allow us to get a decent sense of what perfect virtual reality will look like. And anyone who wants a taste of this world would be wise to read logs of old MUDs and perhaps even acquire a copy of A Rape in Cyberspace.
If MUDs are a good model of the multiplayer dynamics, then LLMs may be a good model of single-player dynamics, as they are decent world models in their own right and are getting better at keeping track of state. If you ask them to create a text adventure, they can be decently fun. And strange, new forms of wireheading come out of this exercise. I asked Claude once for a text adventure set in The Magicians' universe, which is both a novel I like quite a bit and a television show I despise, and I ended up playing a character who was a writer. And I spent an hour asking for reviews of novels I have never written, reviews written by various characters from The Magicians universe. And what a novelist I was! Works of earth-shattering importance flowed from my pen, I assure you. And to my shame, this was far, far more enjoyable than it had any right to be.
Wireheading of this kind is more interesting to me than the carnal sort, which is more self-documenting - or was before AI generated media. And it is probably for the best that I don't work at Anthropic or OpenAI, as I would be incredibly tempted to trawl through the logs and see what sort of odd, ego-satisfying nonsense people are engaging in. Has there ever been a more thorough repository of human desire? The power implied by this data alone is startling. Thankfully, all involved are entirely trustworthy.
I am rambling today, as I want to write quickly so I can focus on my fiction blog. But my general point is: text, already being an unconstrained environment, provides a glimpse of the shape other media will take when it, too, becomes unconstrained. So the media futurist should always ask: "Is there an existing textual analog of a future media I am interested in?" And if there is, as with MUDs and LLM text adventures, it will likely provide a small window into the future.