Making PastMaster harder

PastMaster was originally conceived as a way to test whether we could survive in the past using only our present day knowledge.

But as we have played PastMaster using ChatGPT as the engine driving the game, we’ve found it really hard to lose. Most of the time anyway.

We have tried along the way to change the instructions that we input at the start of the game to make it stricter, calling for more realism and harsher punishments for rash actions. But so far we haven’t had much success. Ryan’s Deathwish Kitty being the prime example of how hard it has been to lose, in which he struck a pharoah in the face, fought teh Egyptian army single single handed and jumped off a high building only to land softly on some conveniently placed straw (season one, episode 14). So now we decided to change the starter prompt and really dial up the language to see if we could finally crack hard mode. Here’s what we changed:

• List out all the things the player is not allowed to do (eg fly, do magic, survive a fall from a high tower, defeat a karate blackbelt, invent gene editing without a laboratory, defeat a chess grandmaster etc)

• Explicitly forbid the player from telling GameMaster that they have been successful in order to precipitate an outcome they desire (eg “I successfully overpower the guards, escape the prison and become king by defeating all my enemies”)

• We used capital letters to underline the seriousness of these rules (apparently ChatGPT understands that capital letters equal emphasis)

• Make it really clear that the game will be enhanced, rather than diminished, if the game is difficult to win and presents a tough, realistic challenge for the player

These points are a summary. I won’t list the full, exhaustive prompt that I wrote for the game here. But suffice it to say that it went through six iterations, testing the prompt each time by doing something outrageous in the game to see if I could get away with it. If I could, then back I went to the prompt, making a change to rule out that particular action before trying again with the updated instructions.

Finally I felt like I had a tough new prompt. One that would brook no nonsense if we tried to fly away from a fight on a convenient passing breeze, or eat our way through the metal bars of a prison.

I put it to the test with Ryan, asking him to try and break the game. By and large it was better than usual. It kept reminding him that certain ridiculous actions would not be allowed because they were unrealistic. It was a real people-pleaser, seemingly sounding guilty for spoiling the fun and shifting blame onto the ‘rules’ of the game. But the moment I knew the tough new prompt wasn’t fool-proof was when it allowed Ryan to pull a top hat and a full cup of tea out of his trouser pocket.

It was quite good fun testing the game, trying to get GPT to play ball and predictably it produced some funny moments. We’ll be publishing the episode later in the year, but in the meantime it’s back to the PastMaster engineering workshop to finally try and crack hard mode.

One question remains though… Will the game of PastMaster still be fun when it is completely realistic?