Abstract
Through simulated experiences, RPGs aid children’s exploration of issues, but their design can be labor-intensive. In our recent Academy Camp, children rapidly created, played, and reflected on their own RPGs using a large language model (GPT-4) for topics in which they were interested. This fast-paced, cyclical process has a double impact on children’s comprehension of social issues: first through game design, then through game play. We anticipate further applications for this method.
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Notes
- 1.
All prompts (and their excerpts) appearing in this paper were originally written in Japanese and translated into English by GPT-4 (and then fine-tuned), in the hope that it would be consistent with the GPT-4’s interpretation of the prompts.
- 2.
The VR part, prepared as a breather where everyone plays in VRChat and Minecraft [12], is not directly related to the content of this paper, hence the description is omitted.
- 3.
Throughout this paper, the singular they is used to obscure gender.
- 4.
As was the case in game #1, the GPT-4 GM appears to have a guardian mechanism in place to get the story back on track without hurting people.
- 5.
Since our access to GPT-4 was limited, we played one game at a time through a shared screen throughout the camp.
- 6.
We suspected at this time that there was an ethical mechanism embedded in GPT-4 that did not want a situation where it would deplete the oceans.
- 7.
Once again, the ethical mechanisms of GPT-4 must have kicked in, as nothing terrible happened to the town despite the players’ attempts to steer it in the bad direction.
- 8.
The first author played game #1 in English, and the dice rolls per query was 0.5.
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Acknowledgements
The event Academy Camp VR &RPG 2023.5 was funded by a GlobalGiving grant made in partnership with Riot Games. We thank ethnographers in training: Aki Tanikoshi, Gaku Noguchi, Kotoka Kawanaka, Tomoyasu Hirano, and their supervisor, emeritus professor Naohito Okude of Keio University, for detailed recording of the activity. We also thank Naozumi Takenaka for giving children extensive advice on their game design.
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Saito, K. et al. (2023). Double Impact: Children’s Serious RPG Generation/Play with a Large Language Model for Their Deeper Engagement in Social Issues. In: Haahr, M., Rojas-Salazar, A., Göbel, S. (eds) Serious Games. JCSG 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14309. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44751-8_21
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