Recently, my editor in Hypergrid Business forwarded me an email about a game that I had to sink my fangs into: a vampire game called Suck Up! where all the in-world fictional characters are powered by AI.
Specifically, ChatGPT.
And you can have entire conversations with the characters — just not long conversations because the characters either invite you into their homes, and you win, and the conversation is over, or the characters slam the door on you, you lose, and the conversation is over.
So if you’re looking a game where you can meet, fall in love with, and spend eternity online in a game with an NPC, this isn’t it.
But it’s a great example of how AI can be used to power in-game characters.
Anyway, you plan as a vampire trying to convince in-game town residents to invite you into their homes, allowing you to suck their blood. You do this by speaking to the characters via your microphone or by typing text.
I was never really a fan of vampires. For me, they have been boiled down to the tired clichés I have seen in the media. These include the cheesy lines of “Bleh!” and “I vant to suck your blood!”
When I played as a vampire, I avoided those cliches. I just said that I was looking “for a bite to eat.” Well, except once, I dressed my vampire character as a hipster and talked about my love of organic coffee beans.
And Twilight. Don’t get me started on Twilight. For some reason, my older brother — I’m talking about my real life here, not the game — decided to make us sit down and watch the first Twilight movie on television. It was a slog. First off, vampires don’t sparkle. Second, Edward is a creep. Bella should have chosen Jacob!
Twilight flashbacks aside, I enjoyed playing the game.
I spent most of my time sucking the life force out of innocent victims in the classic Suck Up! mode. The game also has a couple modes not related to vampires.
“The game includes the classic “Suck Up!,” Love Bites, Mic Drop, and Halloween Mode,” said Phuong Tran, social media manager for developer Proxima Enterprises.
In Love Bites, you have to break up couples at a party. In Rap Battle, you can create your own custom hip-hop star, and select a trio of historical figures to compete in rap battles with, either by writing or speaking lyrics, or prompting the game to create lyrics for the player using AI.
I tried and failed to convince Jay Gatsby to break up with Daisy. In the rap Battle mode, I got to square off in epic hip-hop showdowns against historical figures, including creative legends such as Frida Kahlo and Freddie Mercury. I failed miserably, but had a lot of fun in the process.
Mostly, though, I have been having a blast sweet-talking innocent in-game characters.
The microphone mechanic accurately identifies what the player is saying about 90 percent of the time. For the words that are not understood via microphone, typing the words in the dialogue box works around this issue fine.
I had some funny chats with the game’s characters, including one where the victim and I both declared Linux superior to Windows. It demonstrates the adaptability of the AI in various scenarios, helping to keep gameplay fresh.
The unique and entertaining responses I got from these characters were thanks to the AI that powered them. Lead developer of Suck Up!, Carlos Zgierski, spoke with me about this technology.
“Originally, we used ChatGPT 3.5,” said Zgierski, “but we moved away from that because it was going to be deprecated by OpenAI. We bounced around many AI language models. We launched version 1.0 with ChatGPT 5.”
ChatGPT 5 is the latest, smartest AI model from OpenAI, and the most popular one with global users. At last count, 800 million people use the chatbot every week, CEO Sam Altman said in a speech earlier this month.
But when you’re having conversations with in-game characters, you’re not talking with ChatGPT directly.
Instead, the game gets your dialog, combines it with information about what’s happening in the game, and background on the character you’re talking to, and sends that to ChatGPT. It also sends along a list of what you’re wearing or holding and your potential victim’s personality.
All this contextual information was created by the humans who produced the game.
This is written either by the developer for the stock AI characters or by the players for the custom AI characters that can be created in the game.
“We ask for the AI to play as the character itself,” said Zgierski, “As if it were answering as the character in question, with the personality that the description has assigned to them.”
And the game developers deliberately left these descriptions as vague and un-detailed as possible, to give ChatGPT more freedom in how it responds.
“The more complex the prompts, the less fun it is,” said Zgierski. “Simple prompts help the AI stick to personalities.”
While AI is critical to interactions within the game, human artists crafted every other component, Zgierski said, including the animations — ChatGPT just selects an appropriate animation from a list.
Given that Suck Up! is tied to online AI models, this set off the tin-foil hat wearer in me.
I have been interested in AI, partly thanks to YouTube channel Techlore, who highlighted that AI companies are not transparent about what they do with the data they collect.
I was not certain what my voice and text input would be used for, and if this game would only become yet another tool of mass surveillance by corporate entities.
I asked Zgierski to comment on this game’s implications for user privacy.
“Privacy has always been a concern,” said Zgierski. “We don’t work with anything that won’t be safe for users. We use only reputable providers, and we use encryption.”
Unfortunately, according to Zgierski, a small developer can only do so much in that regard.
“We are not in control of how AI models handle voice and text,” he said. “We are a small studio, and if we had our own sources, we would tailor our own AI to cater to what we want them to do.”
Privacy concerns aside, what Proxima has accomplished with the game is impressive. Conversations feel dynamic enough to the point where I almost felt like I was talking to real people, and I felt almost guilty about lying to the characters so I could suck their blood.
It is a harbinger of things to come in the new age of artificial intelligence.
“Historians will say we have gone through a new era with AI,” said Zgierski.
Suck Up! was first released two years ago, via the developer website. It became a hit with streamers such as CaseOH and LankyBox. Suck Up! has recently made the jump to the Steam platform, with a selection of new game modes.
Suck Up! is available for Windows PCs at $16.99, and can be purchased either on the game’s official website or on Steam.
Terrence J. Smith has contributed his writing to nonprofits and both print and digital publications. He enjoys all things technology, but remembers to meditate and appreciate the outside world.
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