The first fully AI-generated video game is insanely strange and fun

Thanks to a unique mix of quirky gameplay and open world building capabilities, Minecraft remains popular over a decade after its initial release.

A knockoff called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the feel of the original game with a notable and strange twist. The entire game is generated not by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that thinks up every frame.

Oasis was developed by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched, a company that develops custom silicon, to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized to power transformer-based AI algorithms.

Oasis uses a transformative AI model, similar to the one that powers a large language model – apparently just trained on countless examples of people playing Minecraft, to think of each new video frame in response to the previous one and to user input such as clicks or mouse movements. Oasis is similar to a video generating model like Sora, except that a user can control the output.

You can play Oasis online for free and it is both fascinating and surreal to explore. Aside from harboring bizarre artifacts like misshapen livestock and stairs that lead nowhere, the game has an amazing, Inception-esque quality. Since each image is generated based on what the AI ​​model imagines should follow the image it's currently seeing, the world in the game is never entirely stable and tends to shift when you nudge it a little. For example, if you stare too closely at a texture and then look back up, the block world in front of you may be completely different than the one you last saw.

It's also possible to upload your own image for Oasis to work with. I tried adding a photo of my cat Leona and the game turned her into a beautiful block landscape (unfortunately no cat figure in the game, but hey…).

Oasis has become a viral hit as people look for ways to get its AI engine to hallucinate new environments. Sometimes it can even be tricked into teleporting you to a dark lunar landscape similar to The End of Minecraft. It's telling that this generative AI project isn't entirely original, but rather appears to be a bizarre copy of the world's most popular game (it was trained on an open source Minecraft dataset from OpenAI).

“People try to teleport to other worlds and run fast,” says Robert Wachen, chief operating officer at Etched. “That’s one of the main reasons it went viral.”

Oasis' AI approach is too inconsistent and uncontrollable to be useful for a traditional game, says Julian Togelius, a computer science professor at New York University. Generative AI has future potential for controlling in-game characters and perhaps generating scenes or worlds, he says, but it's still early. “It's a very interesting and impressive technology, but right now it's an answer to the search for a question,” says Togelius.

Frank Lantz, a game designer and director of the game design department at New York University, says that Oasis seems to be trapped in a kind of uncanny valley that prevents it from being truly fun to play. But he suggests that an enterprising young game designer might well find a way to turn this game into one that people love. “It’s obviously cool and interesting,” he says.