There isn’t a more perfect platform to showcase the power of AI technologies than games. For decades, games have consistently been at the cutting of edge of turning technologies into real, meaningful experiences. And as LLM and agentic AIs advance, we’re seeing another renaissance in design, of new modalities of play and interactivity being born. At Treasure, we’ve deeply studied their new implications and realize we must build as AI natives.
New games mean new norms.
That’s what we’ll discuss here, and show why Canopy, the sandbox strategy MMODEFI successor to the Bridgeworld game, has the unique plan to leverage it all. Treasure approaches Canopy with AI as a core experience pillar, and not just a feature to slap on.
At their core, these two paradigms are simply:
Why are these two paradigms so important?
Because together they deliver intelligence into our virtual worlds with natural, accessible interfaces. Most AI in games, past and present, is heuristic. I.e. most decision making is based on algorithmic patterns that execute depending on if a rule or machine-learned system deems it proper. I see a player, I shoot near the head… I have less than 10% health so I prioritize health potions in my path, etc.
What LLMs (and the agents that leverage them) do differently is that the heuristics arise probabilistically from oceans of player data… organically so. All the interesting things that humans do while engaging with the game then feeds back into more creative and interesting content that LLMs can query. They can uncover meaningful concepts in their semantic space far faster than game developers can implement new, relevant heuristics!
And here we get to the crux of the real problem facing the all entertainment industries now, esp. games, in both web2 and web3: user fragmentation.
Never before have playerbases been as fragmented and fickle as today. Whether it’s due to there being a games supply glut, hyper-specialization of genres, death of traditional user acquisition channels, or just competing modes of entertainment, the problem of sustaining DAU critical mass is more challenging than ever. Overengineered design alone can’t keep up.
For MMOs and other highly social or competitive games, this problem is exponentially worse. Concurrent players provide "content" to each other through novel interactions and economic participation. Imagine if the spirit and creativity of player interactions lived on even with no one online, as an autonomous world with an identity all its own! Societies will persist off the momentum of our time in them, carrying vestiges of our acts and our culture into a boundless future.
That’s why autonomous agents with humanlike in-game expression are critical to sustaining the best game experience. They’ll continue to evolve our living world, not dependent on when players come and go, or who’s online. Everything we do and say can give them new seeds to grow. When we log back in, there are dynamic new landscapes to explore.
This is a super-advanced version of a classic experience: if you’ve ever raced another player’s ghost in Gran Tursimo, read a stranger’s spooky message in Dark Souls, or stumbled upon leftover monuments built in Minecraft or No Man’s Sky, you know this feeling. And no, simply adding more trad AI bots doesn’t solve the problem. We know they take tremendous amounts of development to capture even a hint of organic behavior.
To summarize, these innovations add nearly Turing-complete game intelligence, and this intelligence improves with BOTH creator heuristics and player activity. This is gameplay symbiosis.