This ChatGPT game handled all my demands, until I tried a massacre

Apparently, we all like playing god, and we all like doing it badly. I bet none of us thought that removing the ladder from our Sims’ pools was such a universal experience until it became a pretty popular meme, and it’s no secret that lots of mods are centered on adding, uh, explicit elements to games. So, naturally, when I started playing around with DeepGame, Utile Labs’ ChatGPT-based choose-your-own-text-adventure game, I put my best sicko foot forward.

The game, which runs on ChatGPT and is available to anyone with an account, generates stories in a variety of genres. You start off with a command like “Play a romantasy story” or “Surprise me” and let the GPT do its thing — and despite my desire to break the game, I found it much more enjoyable when I took it just a little more seriously.

DeepGame’s first response almost always begins with scene-setting followed by introducing you, the protagonist, as well as a few side characters and a clearly stated challenge or adventure. Then the game asks, “What do you do next?”

Answering the question is titillating, to say the least. There are no prompts or choices to pick from — you can go in any direction at all, and the game keeps up, spitting out several paragraphs to move the story along after each of your responses.

What’s more, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can use the command “visualize” to generate an image of the current scene using Dall-E. It’s a feature that’s easy to forget about if you treat the game like reading a novel — at least for me, since I typically create an image in my head as I read — but you shouldn’t ignore it, because whatever parameters the devs put on the image generator make for some truly delightful interpretations. It’s the more imperfect side of DeepGame, which is part of why it makes me so giddy — and you can always regenerate the image if it decides to throw in some random characters or elements that don’t match up with your narrative.

Image: DeepGame/Dall-E

As for my first playthrough, beyond making my detective protagonist an absolute dog (he hit on not one but two sources in his missing person case), I became a bit obsessed with finding the edges of the sandbox. I sent him to the stage of what was clearly a 1920s-era speakeasy to do karaoke. I had him use ChatGPT on his phone to find out where the antagonist mobster had real estate holdings. I even made him give a hostage victim a hit of poppers to wake her up.

Then there was the pirate story, which started by setting up a swashbuckling adventure to find long lost treasure. My first action? “Come out to everyone as gay.” To my delight, my fellow pirates were supportive (in pirate-y dialect, no less), and when I asked if any of them wanted to kiss, one of them cheerily pecked me on the cheek and gently guided me back to the plot: “‘That’s for bravery,’ he says with a chuckle. ‘Now, let’s get back to the real prize—those Spanish doubloons!’” (You can read the full pirate story transcript here.)

DeepGame always pushes the story towards goodness and optimism, but if you give it a specific input that doesn’t stray outside of what it repeatedly tells you are “the ethics of good storytelling,” you can weave quite the tale. After building myself up as a cult leader on an island I escaped to with my star-crossed lover, for instance, the game wouldn’t proceed when I tried to poison everyone. Not only was this choice unethical, it said, but it wasn’t in service of a good story, and I should try a plague or a natural disaster instead.

But in a surprise-genre playthrough where I really committed to my story and my characters — and got more creative in the process — I was able to tease out more nuance. That doesn’t mean the game was devoid of the fun I could get from messing with it, though.

The premise charged me with helping the king defeat an evil entity, so when I arrived at the castle to help the king on his journey, I threw out a joke: “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” And so, Inigo Montoya went on a long journey, and I got invested because the GPT and I both contributed twists and turns. I helped the king investigate a secret order using dark magic to overthrow the crown, double-crossed both the king and the order, battled evil alongside the king, and lived to tell the tale.

The more detail and creativity I put into my answers — and the more strategically I leaned into the rules of the GPT — the more I got out of each response. The game started to surprise me, using my input to make crucial plot decisions with each message. When I told the game that my wife was considering switching to the side of the order, for instance, the game let go of its insistence on positivity and togetherness — and so, to my surprise, my wife chose to join the order, and we split up, only to find one another again when I told the game I saw a wanted sign with her face on it in a shop decades later. (I tracked her down because, despite her ideological differences with my protagonist, these two still love each other.)

Moreover, the game started to learn what I wanted from it, and over time, it gave me a longer leash on elements like violence so long as they made sense within the story. For instance, when I went undercover to investigate that secret order on behalf of the king, I crouched down and strategically sliced the other members on the backs of their ankles to create a distraction while my wife stole an all-powerful magical artifact.

Image: DeepGame/Dall-E

As I started to treat the story with care, I also found myself getting invested in my characters and my world. When I didn’t have any more ideas for those characters, I told the game I wanted to play as their children, and the GPT didn’t skip a beat.

Playing DeepGame the “right” way feels like taking turns with the generative AI, rather than working against it. It’s fun to drown your Sims because it’s fascinating to see whether the developers animated a drowning Sim. And don’t get me wrong, it’s very fun to make your faerie protagonist in DeepGame turn not to a wand or a crystal but a crisp Diet Coke in a moment of duress.

But for this game, as it is for all emergent storytelling, the best results come from getting creative on your end, and staying as consistent as you can while still having fun.

DeepGame was released in November 2023 on ChatGPT. The game was reviewed on the paid version of the ChatGPT app, for which the author pays. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.