Apparently we all like to play God, and we all like to do 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 many mods are aimed at adding, uh, explicit elements to games. So when I started playing with Deep gameUtile Labs’ ChatGPT-based choose-your-own-text adventure, I put my best, sick 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 with a command like “Play romance story” or “Surprise me” and let the GPT do its thing — and despite my desire to destroy the game, I found it a lot more fun when I took it a little more seriously.
DeepGame’s first response almost always begins with setting the scene, followed by introducing you, the protagonist, and a few supporting characters and a clearly defined challenge or adventure. Then the game asks, “What do you do now?”
Answering the question is exciting, to say the least. There are no prompts or choices to pick from — you can go in any direction, and the game will keep going, spitting out multiple paragraphs of story progression after each of your answers.
Additionally, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can use the “visualize” command to generate an image of the current scene using Dall-E. It’s a feature that’s easy to forget if you treat the game like reading a novel – at least for me, since I tend to create an image in my head as I read – but it’s not one to ignore, because no matter what parameters the developers put on the image generator, it makes for some truly delightful interpretations. It’s the more imperfect side of DeepGame, which is partly why it makes me so giddy – and you can always regenerate the image if it decides to add random characters or elements that don’t seem to fit your story.
As for my first playthrough, aside from making my detective protagonist an absolute dog (he had not one but two sources in his missing person case), I became a little obsessed with finding the edges of the sandbox. I sent him onto the stage of what was clearly a 1920s speakeasy to do karaoke. I had him use ChatGPT on his phone to figure out where the antagonistic mafioso owned real estate. I even had him give a hostage a hit of poppers to wake her up.
Then there was the pirate story, which began with the setting up of a swashbuckling adventure voyage to find long-lost treasure. My first action? “Come out as gay to everyone.” To my delight, my fellow pirates were cooperative (in pirate dialect, no less), and when I asked if any of them wanted to kiss, one of them cheerfully gave me a peck on the cheek and gently ushered me back to the plot: “‘That’s for bravery,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Now let’s get back to the real prize: those Spanish doubloons!’” (You can read the full story here transcription of pirate story here.)
DeepGame always pushes the story toward goodness and optimism, but if you give it a specific input that doesn’t deviate from what it repeatedly tells you is “the ethics of good storytelling,” you can weave a whole story. For example, after I’d built myself up as a cult leader on an island I’d fled to with my lover, the game wouldn’t continue when I tried to poison everyone. Not only was this choice unethical, it said, but it also didn’t serve a good story, and I should have tried 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 bring out more nuance. That doesn’t mean the game didn’t have the fun I could have from messing around with it, though.
The premise tasked me with helping the king defeat an evil being, so when I arrived at the castle to help the king on his journey, I threw in 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 involved because the GPT and I both provided twists. I helped the king investigate a secret order using black magic to overthrow the crown, betrayed both the king and the order, fought 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 adapted to the GPT rules—the more I got out of each response. The game began to surprise me, using my input to make crucial plot decisions with each message. For example, when I told the game that my wife was considering switching sides with the Order, the game dropped its emphasis on positivity and togetherness—and so, to my surprise, my wife chose to join the Order and we parted ways, only to find each other again when I told the game that I saw a wanted sign with her face on it in a store decades later. (I tracked her down because, despite her ideological differences from my protagonist, the two of them still love each other.)
Additionally, the game started to learn what I wanted from it, and over time it gave me more freedom to use elements like violence, as long as they made sense within the story. For example, when I went undercover to investigate that secret order on behalf of the king, I crouched down and strategically sliced the other members in their ankles to create a distraction while my wife stole an all-powerful magical artifact.
As I began to care for the story, I found myself becoming more invested in my characters and my world. When I ran out of 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 you’re taking turns working with the generative AI, rather than against it. Drowning your Sims is fun, because it’s fascinating to see whether the developers animated a drowning Sim. And don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun to have your fairy protagonist in DeepGame turn not into a magic wand or a crystal, but into a crispy Diet Coke in a moment of need.
But for this game, and for all beginning stories, the best results come from being creative, being as consistent as possible, and still having fun.
Deep game was released on ChatGPT in November 2023. 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 additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.