ABOUT

What Is This Game?

What Do You Do? is a single-player, text-based story game in which you are presented with a scenario and, over the course of 10 or 15 turns, you solve problems, interact with characters, and uncover secrets.

It’s a bit like Dungeons & Dragons meets Wordle, but it’s also something else entirely. The game uses artificial intelligence to adapt to your choices, so every time you play is different, and every story you get is uniquely yours. The AI is guided by human-written scenarios with plot beats, a cast of characters, and maybe even a twist or two. The result? Stories that are coherent, surprising, and satisfying, since there is always human creativity organizing the narrative and keeping it honest.

How Do You Play?

Every scenario begins with an introduction setting up the initial stakes of the game. Can you rescue your brother from the Glass Sand Desert while navigating the mysteries of the Obsidian Pillars, the Ghost Oasis, and the Lost Aqueduct? What kind of food are you going to serve to the restaurant reviewer while keeping your kitchen from burning down and solving the mystery of the head chef’s disappearance?

Once you decide who you are, What Do You Do? is how you play! Just type in what you would do, and the game engine spins a narrative in which every choice you make impacts the characters and world around you. Be as creative as you’d like! If you describe a gritty noir detective story, the engine will match your tone. If you want a gonzo, silly spectacle, then that’s what you’ll get.

The Secret Origin of What Do You Do?

What Do You Do? is a game, but it’s also a science experiment and just a little bit of a manifesto. It’s informed by nearly 15 years spent working in science and technology policy, where I developed my thinking about responsible innovation, ethical software design, and privacy and data protection.

Like many middle-aged nerds, I grew up with tabletop roleplaying games. I've been chasing that feeling ever since. When AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude first came out, I immediately tried to play story games with them, trying to recreate some of the old magic that comes from a world that truly responds to my choices.

I was disappointed. AI could string together decent sentences, but it had no sense of character, pacing, or when to reveal information and when to hide it. Its stories felt, for lack of a better term, artificial.

The solution I found went back to my old tabletop roots: in those, the player running the game lays out the scope of the world, a cast of characters, and preliminary objectives, but it's the other players' choices that define how that world evolves over time. The job of the game-runner is not just to set up that initial world, it's also to adapt to those choices, and shape them into a coherent narrative. I ended up building a formal narrative engine with a system of plot development, rules, and boundaries, designed to translate my own taste and storytelling sense into an AI-legible form.

Flash forward a month or two of experimentation, and I was legitimately surprised at the quality of the narratives my little system was putting out. Most of all, it was fun. I thought other people might enjoy it too, so I started building.

No dark patterns, no microtransactions, no janky interfaces. I built this game with one goal in mind: to make the best, most impactful stories possible that responded to player agency in a meaningful way. It was my favorite part of running games when I was younger. A friend of mine called it “methadone for TTRPG nerds who no longer have the time to play,” and…frankly I’m never going to top that.

Okay, but what about the AI of it all?

What Do You Do? would not be possible without some amount of large language model magic behind the scenes. It’s what keeps the story coherent and adapts it to player choices in a way that traditional programming methods just can’t match. Many people are skeptical of the recent AI explosion, and for good reasons. I’m one of them. But the technology does exist, and it’s undeniably powerful. We can use it for something good, if we’re careful and clever.

WDYD? is my attempt to build something good in the right way. It’s designed from the ground up to only use AI for tasks that are intractable for traditional methods, and it uses conventional programming for everything else. I built the LLM architecture to generate high-quality prose from smaller, more energy-efficient models.

On top of that, I also designed the game to retain only player data essential for operation. On the content side, the players own the story outputs of their games, and any sharing at all is strictly opt-in and depends on explicit player permission.

Like I said, What Do You Do? is both an experiment and a game, and the only way to see if it works is for real people to give it a shot. I can’t wait to see the stories you create.