Somewhere between a friend and a stranger

Recently we soft-launched battleVS.ai, a platform where you can play simple 1v1 games (like four in a row or rock paper scissors) against your personal AI agent. This is an attempt to write down why I think the idea is interesting.

The obvious objection is that this is nothing new; people have been playing against computers for decades. Nearly every video game has computer/AI-controlled opponents, online shooters and even online poker rooms fill empty slots with bots, and in the last couple of years AI has made those opponents a lot more convincing. So we're under no illusion that battleVS is some sort of major technical breakthrough.

Chess is a good example; computers have been better than the best humans since Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Yet chess is more popular than ever, and almost nobody's idea of a good time is losing to a 'perfect strategy' chess-bot ten times in a row. People still really want to play (and beat) other people. That suggests the meaning of a game depends a lot on who is sitting on the other side, and less on how good they are.

What I think has changed is the arrival of high-quality personal AI agents. Instinct, Muse, Town, Dots, ... are being used by a growing number of people as a personal assistant that is theirs. It books your flight, chases an unpaid invoice, remembers that a friend's birthday is next week or even calls around to get the best quote for a new car. Sam Altman has described the ideal version as 'a model that holds the context of your whole life'. Whether or not you believe the lofty predictions, many who have used one of these agents seriously for a while, will probably recognise that the relationship feels different from using an app. It isn't friendship, but it's closer to the relationship you'd have with a reliable, friendly assistant or a competent colleague. There's familiarity, some trust, and a shared history of things.

And I think that also changes what a game with it means. My rough, personal ranking of who you want to play a game would be (i) close friends and family, because you share a history, the stakes are real and they care about you (and about beating you). (ii) your own, personal AI agent, (iii) a random human online, and (iv) a random AI or bot with no context.

The position many people tend to question is putting your AI agent above a random human. The stranger is a real person, after all, and there's still a particular thrill in knowing the other side wants to win as much as you do. But for the kind of casual, more relaxed games most people prefer, I think the personal agent wins for two reasons: context and reliability.

Context is what makes the chat during a game worth having. Banter between friends is almost never about the game itself; it's about that client presentation that almost went wrong last week, or the fact that you've lost your keys twice this month. A stranger can't do that and a generic AI can only produce generic trash talk. Your agent has the same kind of material your friends do, so when you lose a game it can tell you that's the second thing you messed up this week after your sister's birthday, and it will land because it's true. It can also notice that you've been playing badly since you got back home from a long day of meetings, and suggest a rematch tomorrow instead.

Reliability sounds boring, but anyone who has played games online knows why it matters. Your agent is available at 3am when you can't sleep, or at 8pm after you've had a rough day and just want twenty minutes of switching off. It won't leave halfway through because the Amazon driver knocked on the door, or the boss called, it won't refuse a rematch, and it won't call you names or say something offensive in the chat. It's also, in a broad sense, on your side, which is a slightly odd but pleasant thing to feel about an opponent.

There is of course a fair criticism of all this. The sociologist Sherry Turkle argued in Alone Together, well before the current wave of AI, that 'technology tends to offer the feeling of companionship without the demands of friendship, and that we risk settling for it'. I think that's true, and not something to brush aside lightly, and I don't think a game with your agent should replace a game with a friend. In practice, though, the realistic alternative for most people lying awake at 3am is doomscrolling their phone, not calling a mate to play a quick game online. I'd also expect some of the the more interesting game formats of this new era to be social ones, which is why we're also looking into games where you and your agent could play against another (human) friend and their agent.

For now battleVS only works with Instinct agents, which is a deliberate choice we made. Instinct is available globally, while Muse is still limited to the US and Canada, and we'd like people anywhere to be able to play. Instinct is also completely free, which keeps the barrier to trying this close to zero. Instinct also still feels like it's working out where it fits, and it doesn't have a polished developer platform or a set of ready-made connectors or APIs to plug into. That has downsides, but it also means you have to be a bit creative about how you build with it, and it suits a small team like ours, that is also still experimenting. We may well open battleVS up to other agents later, but at the moment Instinct is for us the most interesting one to work with.

The thesis behind battleVS is fairly simple. Personal agents will become normal, people will use them every day for chores, admin and decisions, and once that relationship exists, it extends into play. In the same way that it does with the people we work and live with. And with that will come some interesting questions. What kind of games are most suitable for this? Is it a genuinely fun and meaningful experience, once the novelty wears off? Should your agent remember that you're on a losing streak and bring it up as banter, or is that the kind of thing only a real human friend gets away with? And does beating something that 'knows you', feel different from beating a random bot, and if so, why?

Early days, but it's a fascinating area to explore.

If anyone wants an Instinct invite - you can use this link: https://app.instinct.com/invite?t=battlevsai