I always love game night with friends. We have a growing list of board games, card games, and party games to choose from, making every gathering different. However, one recent night I wanted to try using AI as a virtual host for the games.
I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and to run three different types of games. The chaos that followed showed me that game master is a role that AI can play quite well, although you’ll have to be alert at first.
Here’s how ChatGPT fared as host of game night.
Curiosities about AI
Trivia games are an easy option to incorporate AI and are a real crowd-pleaser, especially since having ChatGPT asking the questions meant we could all play simultaneously.
To set it up, I asked ChatGPT to act as a test leader for a game night. I then gave the AI some broad topics to interrogate, including space, cooking, and ’90s pop culture, and told it to come up with more. Then, I asked her to come up with ten questions for each and keep track of the scores submitted.
I also told the AI to have fun as a test master and show some personality, and she immediately became a game show host with over-the-top praise and corny jokes. That was nice, but honestly, the fact that none of us had to referee or prepare questions made the jump to playing games much quicker. That said, there were some questions that were too easy or difficult, but they showed me that I need to be specific about the difficulty level in the future.
Virtual Pictionary
Pictionary is a classic game night activity, but not all of us are the best artists, so I decided to hire ChatGPT and their DALL-E image generator. Instead of going back and forth to guess, I explained the concept to ChatGPT and asked him to start penciling one line at a time, with the group potentially guessing after each line.
It took me a while to guess “a cat riding a unicycle on Mars” or “a dinosaur baking a cake,” but seeing the strange final illustrations was a lot of fun. Then we came up with a variation of the game. Each person had to guess what the AI had drawn in a somewhat abstract way. If they guessed wrong, they had to try to draw their interpretation of the image on a whiteboard and see if they were better based on the rest of the group’s guesses. No one got “a giraffe with a crown,” with a confused llama being the closest we got. The group worked on my drawing of a “robot doing yoga,” although I couldn’t figure it out from the AI’s drawing.
AI Murder Mystery
We decided to cap off the night with a more complex party game: a murder mystery. This one didn’t require much direction on my part. I asked ChatGPT to create a custom murder mystery story for the game. I provided the AI with a basic premise: the host (me) was the victim and each of my five friends was a suspect with a unique motive.
ChatGPT quickly told a convoluted story: I was “poisoned” during a celebratory toast, and everyone had a reason for wanting me out of the picture. For example, a friend loves space and supposedly wanted revenge because I canceled her stargazing trip. Another friend became a famous foodie who was angry that I had made fun of his lasagna because it was a little burnt.
I printed out the character profiles and clues that ChatGPT generated and handed them out. The AI suggested accessories, so I set up a small “testing table” with a bottle of “poison,” aka apple juice, and a crumpled note that said, “It’s your turn.” Everyone got into character, questioning each other and forming wild theories. In the end, the killer turned out to be the quieter friend, who did it because she forgot her birthday last year.
Everyone loved playing detective and the twists were really surprising, but the backstory could get a little confusing and contradictory without a little editing. Of all the games, this was probably the best received and I can’t wait to play it again soon.
