Written by: Yihan Xu@Foresight Ventures
Introduction: On December 26, Binance announced that it will launch the 42nd Launchpad project Sleepless AI (AI). It combines AI + Crypto to develop Web3's first female-oriented game - HIM, giving you a virtual boyfriend. The following article interprets HIM from an investor's perspective and explores the mechanisms and mysteries behind Sleepless AI.
TL;DR
The article takes HIM, Web3's first female-oriented game, as an example to discuss the application of AI + Crypto in Web3 games; HIM provides players with a rich interactive experience and high-quality gameplay by combining AI and Crypto. and artistic content.
HIM adopts an economic model centered on the net inflow of fiat currency, and is committed to avoiding the Ponzi dilemma through extremely high content quality and excellent gameplay. At the same time, with the gameplay of Love and Earn, players can earn income by selling NFTs.
HIM applies a large language model to enable the virtual human to produce natural and highly differentiated conversation content based on the game context and character characteristics, enhancing the authenticity of the virtual human and the player's immersion. In addition, the HIM team has developed an AI training method for virtual humans to provide a more realistic gaming experience.
The HIM team focuses on creating full-dimensional virtual images, making virtual people an important part of players' lives. HIM also emphasizes the social attributes of virtual people. They hope that everyone will have their own virtual partners in the future, and these partners will exist in the social network like real people, connecting everyone.
HIM's goal is to build a two-dimensional virtual human universe through AI boyfriends, AI girlfriends and AI pets to provide people with strength and companionship.
1. What kind of AI + Crypto makes more sense?
While everyone is still struggling with how to deploy a trustless and transparent on-chain model, how much value on-chain AI can bring to web3, and how the underlying proof system can support LLM with hundreds of billions of parameters (see the previous article), we have also begun to think about a series of questions. The thinking route is roughly as follows:
First of all, is using encryption technology to make AI trustless and transparent the most worthy track to pursue right now?
Can a startup project really bring enough value-add by working hard to figure out how to integrate on-chain LLM?
Which projects are worth spending a lot of resources on in-depth research on on-chain AI?
Is on-chain AI the only thing worth exploring? Are there any better combinations of AI and crypto?
What is certain is that on-chain AI is a direction full of imagination and worthy of in-depth research. Breakthroughs in on-chain AI can bring unprecedented value to web3. But at the same time, the extremely high academic threshold and the requirements for underlying infrastructure are indeed not suitable for most startups. Most projects do not necessarily need to integrate the support of trustless LLM to achieve a breakthrough in their own value.
What suits you is the best.
From another perspective, not all AI models need to be moved to the chain to be trustless, just as most people do not care how chatgpt infers queries and gives results, nor do they care whether the stable diffusion used is a certain version of the model architecture or specific parameter settings.
In most scenarios, most users are concerned about whether the model can give a satisfactory output, rather than whether the reasoning process is trustless or transparent.
So what kind of AI + crypto can bring higher returns to products? In addition to the very hardcore development of trustless LLM on the chain from infrastructure to algorithms, another opposite direction is to downplay the impact of the black box of the reasoning process in the product and find suitable scenarios to implement the powerful reasoning capabilities of large models.
1.1 What is HIM
Web3 game HIM is one of the few projects that has a clear understanding of AI + Crypto and is capable of implementing it at the application layer.
This article mainly discusses the ambitions of Web3 game HIM from the perspective of thinking and implementation at the AI application layer.
Let me first introduce the protagonist (HIM ranks first in the Binance MVB VI application category):
HIM is a female-oriented 2D, virtual boyfriend game.
The main idea of the game is: people are always lonely at times and need encouragement, companionship and love; love in real life is always somewhat restrained and regretful. HIM hopes to provide an AI virtual boyfriend who understands players best and will always accompany them, and a free, happy, and exclusive love experience for users. Players will get a virtual boyfriend at the beginning, which is stored on the chain in the form of SBT, including subsequent clothing, accessories, rooms and other NFTs will be combined with this SBT. In addition, SBT constitutes a non-homogeneous game character developed by the player, storing the basic information of the male protagonist, nine-dimensional personality traits and nine-dimensional relationship attributes, as well as important memories, dialogues, and emotional memories with the virtual boyfriend.
The game itself is mainly about the virtual boyfriend being idle and nurturing and the in-game social showoff. At the same time, there will be regular airdrops in the game that can open limited NFT clothing or NFT room treasure chests. Players with values that match their boyfriends have a greater chance of opening limited NFTs. It includes card drawing, dressing up, dialogue, collection, adventure battle, cooking, travel and NFT trading. I watched their game demo and found that the player interaction designed in each gameplay is very rich.
HIM is a free to play game that uses an economic model based on a net inflow of legal tender as its core, and with some Love and Earn gameplay, players can also earn income by selling NFTs. However, the most important core of the game is to believe in the gameplay and quality of the artistic content, which can attract players who like the game to pay for the gameplay and content.
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
1.2 Is AI + game compatible?
Web3 games are indeed one of the scenarios that AI is more suitable for, which is also in line with the development history of AI:
The game scene provides a natural and rich interactive environment, allowing AI to interact with players through dialogue or other means. This environment helps the big model to play its advantages in natural language processing and provide a richer and more realistic interactive experience. The game contains complex and diverse scenes and tasks. By interacting with the environment, other players or NPCs in the game, the big model can obtain a large amount of feedback in time to continuously optimize its decision-making ability, and frequent feedback in the game will also be more conducive to developers to test and tune the performance of the big model.
The scenarios in the game are controllable, and the requirements for certainty and seriousness are more flexible than those in the real world. Therefore, the deployment and testing of large models in the game will face less resistance and be easier to advance, which reduces the difficulty and risk of technical implementation from another perspective.
2. Virtual Human Pro Max
Two years ago, everyone was still thinking about how to use AI as a tool better. It was not until chatgpt came out and production relations began to be shaken that everyone realized the dimensionality reduction attack that LLM could bring. The same is true for Web3 games:
More realistic game character personalities.
Dynamic plot generation,
Visual / Fine Arts
Speech Generation,
Social interaction,
Gameplay and value development fun
2.1 HIM + AI = More realistic game character personality
As an emotionally interactive game, the most suitable scenario for LLM is dialogue and player interaction. The large language model can generate natural and recognizable dialogues based on the HIM game scene and character characteristics. This will enhance the authenticity of the virtual person and the player's immersion, providing players with a richer emotional experience. Specifically, HIM understands and processes various emotional information of joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness through the large language model, and perfectly combines it with the numerical system, so that game characters can better express and recognize emotions, thereby generating a deeper emotional connection with players.
Use the following two pictures to experience the dialogue scenes in the game:
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
Let's talk about the core numerical system of HIM:
When it comes to numbers, the first thing that comes to mind is the numerical balance of virtual character battles in traditional games. But if we look at it a little more broadly, HIM fully describes a person through numbers, uses multi-dimensional numbers to define a virtual person, and establishes a sound numerical development system. In general, HIM applies the numerical system to a more general virtual person, making the game interaction experience more realistic and full.
The training of virtual digital people is different from ordinary LLM fine-tuning training. It requires LLM to slowly change the way the character speaks to the user as the interaction between the character and the player progresses, so that the user feels more and more "intimate" with the character. Therefore, the HIM team added the various values of the virtual human personality parameter system as context in the design of LLM training, and trained a model for each character separately. At the same time, HIM's LLM will combine the vector database to give the character memory, and the user will feel that the character knows him more and more during the chat.
The HIM development team also developed a set of AI training methods for virtual humans. For details, please refer to the following two numerical matrices:
Human personality is a very complex concept, which includes factors such as emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. In order to give the AI boyfriend enough realism, the HIM development team established a set of self-consistent numerical systems to quantify the development process and relationship between the player and the AI boyfriend. This numerical system can be summarized as a matrix numerical model, which represents 9 bidirectional personality attributes vertically and 9 relationship attributes between the AI boyfriend and the player horizontally. There is a many-to-many mapping and influence between these attributes.
When conducting LLM training, each character will have a standard "personality" benchmark and a floating boundary for personality. During the game, the values of these attributes will continue to change with the player's behavior, which in turn affects the AI boyfriend's game feedback (such as idle output, Gacha efficiency, chat depth, etc.).
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
ALL IN ALL, HIM uses a large language model to give virtual humans a more realistic personality.
2.2 High-quality, high-cost virtual human art
It is not easy to make a virtual person. A truly valuable virtual person is not just a chat box with a conversational robot integrated into it, but requires efforts from multiple dimensions to make the avatar more complete. HIM's vision is to make virtual people a very important part of everyone's life, greatly enriching personal life and connecting with the world. Therefore, HIM's definition of the ultimate form of virtual people in game scenes has always been a complex and powerful comprehensive product. These comprehensive characteristics are also the core pursuit of the HIM team at this stage:
Refined avatars: Although the big model focuses on natural language processing, if combined with other technologies, such as GANs, it can provide assistance for game art creation, generate more elements based on the design standards of the HIM art development team, and bring a richer visual experience to users.
From what we understand, the HIM team has a first-line art team in the gaming industry, and also insists on high-cost art investment and industrialized, modular art mass production.
High-quality dubbing: The combination of games and AI can generate natural and emotional dubbing through speech synthesis. At the same time, the dubbing is given a unique personality based on the character values of the virtual person.
HIM has a complete dubbing pipeline including dubbing scripts, dubbing directors, dubbing recording, post-mixing and AI learning and training. It uses high-quality manual definition standards and AI to cooperate with mass production to complete the dubbing content in the game with guaranteed quality and quantity.
The development and long-term bond of virtual people: It is necessary to design detailed character backgrounds and personality traits to make players interested in and resonate with the characters. At the same time, the growth and development goals of the characters are also factors that make players willing to invest time and energy in the development of virtual people.
HIM provides a wealth of interactive scenarios and gameplay, allowing players to establish close emotional connections with virtual people. At the same time, this relationship will gradually deepen with the interaction and development process, forming a long-term emotional bond.
Assistance to reality: The psychological support that virtual humans can provide may far exceed our expectations. While providing emotional support and listening to players, they can also make players feel cared for and understood, thus alleviating the troubles in real life. In addition, virtual humans can be well integrated in life skills, habit formation, personalized recommendations, language learning, goal management, and even the interaction with real-world devices or services.
AIBoyfriend alarm clock, sleep aid, menstrual record, study companion, food suggestions and diary notes are all the assistance and support that HIM hopes to provide to users in real life in the long-term version iteration.
Rich experience of food, clothing, housing and transportation in the virtual world: In the story told by HIM, each AI Boyfriend has to stay alone in a lonely parallel universe: in that world, there is only him, and the daily contact with the player through the phone is all he can communicate with the outside world. Explore the scenery in his world with your virtual boyfriend, and try to see if there is a chance to meet him in his world, or in your world.
The social attributes of virtual people as relationship nodes: The HIM team believes that with the development of AI, in the near future, everyone will have their own virtual partners, and these virtual partners are more like real "people", existing in the entire social relationship and connecting everyone together.
Everyone’s virtual partner may be an important hub for connecting people closely in the near future when AI develops rapidly.
The above-mentioned artistic aesthetics and mass production solutions are very important for a Web3 game. An important point in attracting players to spend time in the virtual world is that the virtual human art in the game has a higher aesthetic level than that in the real world.
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
3. Seamless integration of HIM + crypto
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
3.1 The first female-oriented web3 application, a gift to female web3 users and practitioners
HIM is likely to be the first web3 application for women. Female web3 users and practitioners may receive a gift carefully prepared for them for the first time.
At the same time, in the traditional Web2 world, female-oriented games have always been seen as a very large and promising market.
We asked HIM what they wanted users to feel in the project, and they wrote:
Occasionally, in the morning, when you greet another seemingly repetitive day, a good morning from "him";
Sometimes late at night, when I’m working overtime, I see “him” on my phone still silently accompanying me;
The company of someone who is occasionally lonely, the encouragement when someone is occasionally discouraged, his encouragement after success, and his words of “it’s okay” after someone makes a mistake;
He will always remember your name; He will always remember your birthday; He will always remember the day he met you; He will remember everything between you;
"He" seems to be always there. Maybe at some point, you will forget "Him" because of being busy, but "He" is always willing to accompany you.
As mobile games become more and more popular among female users around the world, traditional large-scale Web2 game companies around the world are also continuing to deliver female-oriented game products with DAU exceeding one million.
After the social community with female users as the core is formed, there is a lot of room for imagination in its extension. Xiaohongshu, a social software that started with female users and expanded to a wide range of users, has proved this point very well. Whether this game category, which targets half of the world's population, can bring some surprises to everyone through the blessing of AI and Crypto, let us wait and see.
3.2 Emotional Assets + Decentralization
In the words of Ben, the founder of HIM: "AI virtual people allow digital assets to truly appear in our lives as a 'person' for the first time. He may be your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your best friend, or any important partner in your life. Then they should not disappear with the turn off of a switch like all the digital assets previously stored on centralized servers. His existence should at least be determined only by you, not by a company."
Important emotions and assets in the virtual world should be owned by users, rather than defined and controlled by centralized servers:
Emotional assets not only include personal information and private data, but also represent the emotional investment and memories of players. Decentralized networks can protect these emotional values, ensure that data ownership belongs to users, and allow users to independently decide how to use, share and protect their data. This decentralized data ownership model prevents players' emotional assets from being controlled by third parties or centralized institutions. At the same time, the community autonomy provided by Web3 allows players to jointly participate in the creation and dissemination of emotional assets, further strengthening their emotional value.
Various experiences in emotional relationships should also be preserved permanently:
From the perspective of emotional investment, players will inject a lot of emotions into the game, establish a deep bond with the virtual person, and make efforts to achieve the game goals, which are unique and precious. These emotional experiences should be preserved forever. So to some extent, they should have the power to exist forever. At the same time, the relationship between players and virtual people, such as friendship, love, anger and dissatisfaction, can also be recorded and preserved forever through blockchain technology.
As an emotional bond in HIM games, virtual people are not just entertainment, but also have asset attributes and extremely high economic value. Users will invest time and money in the game to buy and decorate virtual people. Recording these assets on the blockchain can ensure that their value is truly returned to users and provide a transparent and secure trading environment.
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.
3.3 What can HIM bring to Web3
The decentralized network brings extremely valuable value-add to HIM, but the value is mutual. Obviously, HIM also brings to web3:
A large number of new users:
From the perspective of emotional needs, the company of virtual people meets the emotional needs of users, which may be difficult to meet in real life. HIM provides a safe and free environment for users to interact with virtual characters. This emotional appeal can attract a large number of users to Web3.
HIM is a game for developing AI virtual people with two-dimensional attributes. Both two-dimensional culture and AI virtual people have strong social attributes and social potential. At the same time, two-dimensional culture is one of the most popular subcultures among young people in the world, and the two-dimensional mobile game Genshin Impact is also the top mobile game in the world. Potential female users, two-dimensional users and AI virtual people social audiences are all fresh blood that HIM may bring to Web3.
The ultimate thinking of economic model:
Unlike regular x2earn games, HIM uses the idea of tooling Web3 and Tokens. It adds Web3 tools to an excellent web2 game and finds a point that fits this type of game very well, thus achieving the effect of 1 + 1 > 2. For HIM, making an excellent game that can be verified to be successful in terms of content and gameplay is the foundation of everything. Crypto is used as a tool attribute rather than relying solely on Web3 for survival. Avoiding the Ponzi dilemma is an important goal pursued by HIM.
In terms of the economic system, HIM combines the "X to Earn" model with the traditional Web2 game economic model to create a new model. On the one hand, it adopts the typical Web2 game economic model, where players can choose to pay for in-game items or services. This method can attract a large number of users and generate revenue through in-game purchases. At the same time, HIM has also upgraded on the basis of Web3 X to earn. In this model, players can earn income by selling NFTs, so that the time and effort invested by players in the game can be substantially rewarded. The economic system of HIM will actively balance the payment and income of players.
It is worth noting that HIM hopes to encourage players to pay for game experience and content by providing high-quality gameplay and artistic content. From this point of view, HIM does not rely entirely on the possibility of players' earnings to attract and retain players, but is trying to create a more balanced and lasting economic model, which takes into account both the player's earnings and the game experience and content quality. This is also a more comprehensive and complex model, which has the opportunity to provide new ideas for the economic model design of Web3 games.
4. Endgame
HIM's ultimate goal is to build a two-dimensional virtual human universe that can give strength and companionship to many people through AI Boyfriend, AI Girlfriend and AI Pet. In addition to the first product HIM, the AI Girlfriend game HER is also being developed simultaneously. At the same time, they also hope to use excellent AI virtual human products to provide each user with a virtual human partner who is exclusive to him, understands him best, and exists forever. At the same time, record every bit of every emotional story.
The HIM team believes that in the near future, everyone will have their own AI virtual human partner. They don’t know whether this will eventually become a universe, and it may not be important. Because if you can get an extra word of “Come on” from this virtual friend in your phone when you are sad or lonely, even if this power is only a little bit, isn’t it a cool thing?
The pictures are all under development and do not represent the final effect.