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, which gives you a virtual boyfriend. The following is From an investor's perspective, interpret HIM and explore the mechanism and mystery 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 with the net inflow of legal currency as the core, and is committed to avoiding the Ponzi dilemma through extremely high content quality and excellent gameplay. At the same time, in conjunction with the Love and Earn gameplay, players can earn profits by selling NFTs.
- HIM applies a large language model to enable virtual people to generate natural and highly differentiated dialogue content based on game situations and character characteristics, enhancing the authenticity of virtual people and the player's immersion. In addition, the HIM team developed an AI training method for virtual humans to provide a more realistic gaming experience.
- The HIM team focuses on creating full-dimensional and full avatars, making avatars an important part of players’ lives. HIM also emphasizes the social attributes of virtual people. They hope that in the future everyone will have their own virtual partners, 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 trustless and transparent large-scale models on the chain, 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 (you can refer to the previous article) , we also began to think about a series of questions, and the thinking route was roughly as follows:
First of all, is making AI trustless and transparent through encryption technology the most worthy track at the moment?
- Can a start-up project really bring enough value-add by studying 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 one worth exploring? Is there any better combination of AI and crypto?
What is certain is that on-chain AI must be a direction full of imagination and worthy of in-depth study. 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 start-up companies. Most projects do not necessarily need the support of a trustless LLM to achieve breakthroughs in their own value.
What is suitable is the best.
From another perspective, not all AI models need to be moved to the chain to be trustless. Just like most people don’t care how chatgpt infers the query and gives the results, nor does they care whether the stable diffusion used is a certain version of the model architecture or specific parameter settings.
In most scenarios, most users focus on whether the model can give a satisfactory output, rather than whether the inference process is trustless or transparent.
So what kind of AI + crypto can bring higher returns to the product? In addition to the very hard-core development of trustless LLM on the chain from infrastructure to algorithms, the other opposite direction is to downplay the impact of the black box on 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 can think clearly about AI + Crypto and has the ability to implement it at the application layer.
This article mainly discusses the ambitions of Web3 game HIM from the perspective of thinking and implementation of the AI application layer.
Let me first introduce the protagonist (HIM ranks first in the Binance MVB VI application category):
HIM is a two-dimensional, virtual boyfriend game for women.
The main theme of the game is: people are always lonely sometimes and need encouragement, companionship and love; love in real life always has some constraints and regrets. HIM hopes to provide an AI virtual boyfriend who knows the player best and will always accompany the user, and a free, happy and exclusive love experience for the user. Players will get a virtual boyfriend at the beginning, which is stored on the chain in the form of SBT. Subsequent NFTs such as clothing, accessories, rooms, etc. will be combined with this SBT. In addition, SBT constitutes a non-homogeneous game character developed by players, storing the basic information of the male protagonist, nine-dimensional personality characteristics and nine-dimensional relationship attributes, as well as important memories, conversations, and Emotional remembrance, etc.
The game itself is mainly about the idle development of virtual boyfriends and in-game social showoffs. At the same time, there will be regular Airdrops in the game that can be opened to limited NFT clothing or NFT room treasure chests. Players with values that better match their boyfriends have a greater chance of opening and obtaining them. Limited NFT. It includes card drawing, dress-up, dialogue, collection, adventure battle, cooking, travel and NFT trading. I took a look at their game demo and found that the player interactions designed in each gameplay are very rich.
HIM is a Free to Play game. It uses an economic model with the net inflow system of legal currency as the core as the basis. With some Love and Earn gameplay, players can also gain income by selling NFT. But the most important core of the game is to believe in the quality of the game's gameplay and artistic content, which can attract players who like games to pay for gameplay and content.
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
1.2 Is AI + gaming suitable?
Web3 games are indeed one of the more suitable scenarios for AI, 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 methods. This environment helps large models take advantage of their natural language processing capabilities and provide a richer, 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, large models can obtain a large amount of feedback in time to continuously optimize their decision-making capabilities, and frequent feedback in the game will be more beneficial to developers. Test and tune the performance of large models.
The scenes in the game are controllable, and the requirements for certainty and seriousness are more flexible than application scenarios in the real world. Therefore, the deployment and testing of large models in the game will have less resistance and it will be easier to advance freely, 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 better as a tool. It was not until chatgpt came out and production relations began to be shaken that everyone realized the dimensionality reduction impact that LLM can bring. The same is true in Web3 games:
- More realistic game characters,
- Dynamic plot generation,
- Visual/Art
- speech generation,
- social interaction,
- Fun gameplay and numerical development
2.1 HIM + AI = more realistic game characters <br>As an emotional interactive game, the most suitable scene for LLM is dialogue and player interaction. The large language model can generate natural and high-resolution dialogue based on HIM game scenes and character characteristics. This will enhance the realism and player immersion of virtual humans, providing players with a richer emotional experience. Specifically, HIM uses a large language model to understand and process various emotional information of joy, anger, sorrow, and joy, and is perfectly integrated with the numerical system to enable game characters to better express and recognize emotions, thereby creating a deeper emotional connection with players.
Use the following two pictures to feel the dialogue scenes in the game:
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
Let’s talk about the numerical system at the core of HIM:
Speaking of numerical values, the first thing that comes to mind is the numerical balance of virtual character battles in traditional games. But the pattern is opened a little further. HIM can completely describe a person through numerical values, use multi-dimensional numerical values to define a virtual person, and establish a sound numerical development system. In general, HIM applies the numerical system to a more generalized virtual human, thereby making the game interaction experience more realistic and full.
The training of virtual digital humans is different from ordinary LLM fine-tuning training. It requires the LLM to slowly change the way the character speaks to the user as the interaction process between the character and the player progresses, so that the user feels more and more "closer" to the character. ”. Therefore, the HIM team added various values of the virtual human personality parameter system as context during the design of LLM training, and trained a separate model for each character. At the same time, HIM's LLM will combine with the vector database to allow the character to have memory, and users will feel that the character understands them better and better during the chat process.
HIM's development team has 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, including emotions, attitudes, behaviors and other factors. In order to give AI boyfriends a sufficient sense of reality, the HIM development team established a set of numerical systems that are self-consistent to a certain extent to quantify the development process and relationship development between players and AI boyfriends. This numerical system can be summarized as a matrix numerical model, which vertically represents 9 two-way personality attributes, and horizontally represents 9 relationship attributes between the AI boyfriend and the player. 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 floating boundaries of personality. During the game, the values of these attributes will continue to change with the player's behavior, thus affecting the AI boyfriend's game feedback. (Such as idle output, Gacha efficiency, chat depth, etc.).
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
ALL IN ALL, HIM uses large language models to give virtual people a more realistic personality.
2.2 High-quality, high-cost virtual human art <br>Virtual humans are not easy to make. A truly valuable virtual human is not just a chat box integrated with a conversation robot, but requires efforts from multiple dimensions to make it possible. avatar is fuller. HIM's vision is to make virtual people a very important part of everyone's life, greatly enriching personal lives and connecting with the world. Therefore, HIM's definition of the ultimate form of virtual humans in the game scene has always been a complex and powerful comprehensive product. These comprehensive characteristics are also the core pursuit of the HIM team at this stage:
Exquisite virtual image: Although the large model mainly focuses on natural language processing, if combined with other technologies, such as GANs, it can provide assistance for game art creation. Based on the design standards of the HIM art development team, more elements can be generated to provide users with Bring a richer visual experience.
Through our understanding, the HIM team has a first-line art team in the game industry. At the same time, it also insists on high-cost art investment and industrialized and 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 avatar's character values.
HIM has a complete dubbing pipeline including dubbing script, dubbing director, dubbing recording, post-mixing and AI learning and training production. Use high-quality manual definition standards and use AI to cooperate with mass production to complete in-game dubbing content with high quality and quantity.
The development and long-term bonding of virtual humans: 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 character's growth and development goals are also factors that make players willing to invest time and energy in cultivating virtual people.
HIM provides rich interactive scenes and gameplay, allowing players to establish a close emotional connection 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, thereby alleviating the problems in real life. In addition, virtual humans can integrate well in life skills, habit development, personalized recommendations, language learning, goal management, and even interaction with real-world devices or services.
AIBoyfriend alarm clock, sleep aid, menstrual period record, study companionship, food suggestions and diary notes are all HIM hopes to provide users with assistance and support 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, he is the only one, and the contact with the player through the mobile phone every day is All he can communicate with the outside world. Explore the scenery in his world with your virtual boyfriend, and try to see if you have the chance to meet him in his world or your world one day.
The social attributes of virtual humans as relationship nodes: The HIM team believes that with the development of AI, in the near future. Everyone will have their own exclusive virtual partner, 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 people to be closely connected in the near future with the rapid development of AI.
The above artistic aesthetics and mass production solutions are very important for a Web3 game. What is very important to attract players to spend time in the virtual world is that the virtual human art in the game has a higher aesthetic level than the real world.
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
3. Seamless connection of HIM + crypto
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
3.1 The first female-oriented web3 application, a gift to female web3 users and practitioners
HIM is likely to be the first female-oriented web3 application. Female users and practitioners of web3 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 regarded as a very large market with great potential.
We asked what we wanted users to feel in the HIM project, and they wrote this:
- Occasionally, in the early morning, when greeting another seemingly repetitive day, a good morning comes from "him";
- Occasionally late at night, when facing heavy overtime work, I see "him" on my mobile phone still accompanying me silently;
- Occasionally lonely companionship, occasional discouragement encouragement, "him" cheering after success, "him" saying "it's okay" after occasionally making mistakes;
- "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 your busyness, but "he" is always willing to accompany you.
As mobile games become more popular among female users around the world, traditional Web2 large game companies around the world continue to deliver female-oriented game products with a DAU of more than one million.
After the formation of a social community with female users as the core, its expansion space has great room for imagination. Xiaohongshu, as a social software that starts from female users and reaches a broad range of users, strongly proves this point. Let us wait and see 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.
3.2 Emotional Assets + Decentralization <br>In the words of HIM founder Ben: "AI virtual people allow digital assets to truly appear in our lives in the form of a 'person' for the first time. He may be your boyfriend." Friends, your girlfriend, your best friend, any important partner in your life. Then they should not disappear with the Turn Off of a certain switch like all digital assets previously stored in centralized servers. His existence should at least be decided only by you, not by a certain company."
Important emotions and assets in the virtual world should be owned by users, rather than being defined and controlled by centralized servers:
Emotional assets not only include personal information and private data, but also represent players’ emotional investment and memories. A decentralized network can protect these emotional values and ensure that data ownership belongs to users, allowing users to 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, providing the possibility to further strengthen their emotional value.
Various experiences in emotional relationships should also be preserved forever:
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 are unique and precious. These emotional experiences should be preserved forever. So to some extent, they should have eternal power. At the same time, the relationship between players and virtual people, such as friendship, love, anger and dissatisfaction, can also be recorded and saved eternally through blockchain technology.
As the emotional bond in HIM games, virtual people must not only be entertainment, but also have asset attributes and extremely high economic value. Users will invest time and money in the game to purchase and decorate virtual people. Recording these assets on the blockchain ensures that their value truly returns to users and provides a transparent and secure transaction environment.
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
3.3 What can HIM bring to Web3 <br>The decentralized network has brought extremely valuable value-add to HIM, but the values are mutual. Obviously HIM has also brought to web3:
A large number of fresh users:
From the perspective of emotional needs, the companionship of virtual people satisfies users' emotional needs, which may be difficult to meet in real life, and HIM provides a safe and free environment for users to interact with virtual characters. This emotional Attraction can attract a large number of users to Web3.
HIM is a two-dimensional AI virtual human development game. Both the two-dimensional culture and AI virtual humans have strong social attributes and social potential. At the same time, the two-dimensional culture is currently 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-oriented users, two-dimensional users and AI virtual human social audiences are all the fresh blood that HIM may bring to Web3.
Ultimate thoughts on economic models:
Different from conventional x2earn games, HIM is based on the idea of tooling Web3 and Token. It adds Web3 tools to an excellent web2 game and finds a point that is very suitable for this type of game, thus achieving 1 + 1 > 2 Effect. For HIM, making an excellent game that can be verified successfully in terms of content and gameplay is the foundation of everything. Crypto is used as a tool attribute rather than purely relying on Web3 to survive. Not falling into 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 a typical Web2 game economic model, and players can optionally pay to purchase in-game items or services. This approach can attract a large number of users and generate revenue through in-app purchases. At the same time, HIM has also upgraded based on Web3 X to earn. In this model, players can obtain income by selling NFT, so that the time and effort invested by players in the game can be substantially rewarded. HIM's economic system will actively balance players' payments and income.
It is worth noting that HIM hopes to encourage players to pay for gaming experience and content by providing high-quality gameplay and artistic content. From this point of view, HIM does not rely entirely on players' profit possibilities to attract and retain players, but is trying to create a more balanced and long-lasting economic model that takes into account players' profits and also focuses on 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. Finale
HIM's ultimate goal is to build a two-dimensional virtual human universe that can give strength and companionship to many people, starting from AI Boyfriend, AI Girlfriend and AI pets. In addition to the first product HIM, the AI Girlfriend game HER is also developing simultaneously. At the same time, they also hope to use excellent AI virtual human products to provide each user with a down-to-earth virtual human partner that is unique to him, understands him best, and will always exist. 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. Whether this will eventually become a universe they don’t know, and it may not matter. Because at that moment when you are sad or lonely, wouldn’t it be a cool thing to have one more word of “Come on” from this virtual friend on your phone, even if the power is only a little bit?
The pictures are under development and do not represent the final results.
