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I still love game night with friends. We have an ever-expanding list of board games, card games and party games to choose from, making every gathering different. On a recent evening, however, I wanted to try using AI as the virtual host of the games.
I asked ChatGPT for some ideas and to be the one who actually manages three different types of games. The chaos that followed showed me that mastering the game is a role the AI can play quite well, although you’ll need to watch carefully first.
Here’s how ChatGPT did as a game night host.
AI Trivia
Trivia games are an easy option to incorporate AI, and are a real crowd pleaser, especially since having ChatGPT ask the questions meant we could all play simultaneously.
To set it up, I asked ChatGPT to act as a quizmaster for a game night. So I gave the AI some broad topics for question topics, including space, cooking, and 90s pop culture, and told it to come up with more. So, I instructed them to come up with ten questions for each and follow our submitted scores.
I also told the AI to have some fun as a quizmaster and show some personality, and it immediately became a game host with over-the-top praise and cheesy jokes. It was nice, but honestly, none of us needed to referee or prepare the questions asked for a much faster jump in the games. That said, there were a few questions that were too easy or too hard, but it showed me that I need to be specific about the difficulty level in the future.
Virtual Pictionary
Pictionary is a classic game night activity, but not all of us are the best artists, so I decided to enlist ChatGPT and its DALL-E image generator. Instead of going back and forth on guessing, I explained the concept to ChatGPT and started drawing pictures with the pen one line at a time, with the possibility for the group to guess after each line.
It took a while to guess “a cat riding a unicycle on Mars” or “a dinosaur making a cake,” but seeing the final weird illustrations was a lot of fun. Then we came up with a variation of the game. Each person had to guess what the AI had drawn in a somewhat abstract form. If they guessed wrong, they had to try to draw their interpretation of the image on a white board and see if it was better based on the rest of the group’s images. No one had “a giraffe wearing a crown”, with a confused blade being the closest. The group made my drawing of a “robot doing yoga”, although I couldn’t tell from the AI drawing.
AI Murder Mystery
We decided to cap off the night with a more complex party game: a murder mystery. This one doesn’t need much direction from me. I asked ChatGPT to create a custom murder mystery story for the game. I provided the AI with a basic premise: the host (me) was the victim, and each of my five friends was a suspect with a unique motive.
ChatGPT quickly spun a convoluted story: I was “poisoned” during a celebratory toast, and everyone had a reason to want me out of the picture. For example, a friend loves space and supposedly wanted revenge because I canceled his stargazing trip. Another friend turned out to be a famous foodie who was upset that I had made fun of his lasagna because it was a little burnt.
I printed the character profiles and clues that ChatGPT generated and gave them. The AI suggested props, so I set up a small “evidence table” with a bottle of “poison”, aka. apple juice, and a crumpled note that said, “It’s your turn.” Everyone got into character, grilling each other and forming wild theories. Ultimately, the killer turned out to be the quieter friend, which he did because I forgot his birthday last year.
Everyone loved playing detective, and the twists were really surprising, but the backstory could have been a bit confusing and contradictory without some editing. Of all the games, this was probably the best received and one I can’t wait to do again soon.
