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You awaken in a dark room, a pair of eyes staring at you from across a desk. Soon you'll realize the first rule of survival in this strange place: In order to live, YOU MUST SELL.
Outbound Sales is a game about conversing with computers in an open dialogue, where the only tools at your disposal are your words and your wit. Buy an item, select an unwitting client and let the sales pitch begin.
Remember, everything in this world is only worth as much as you can get someone else to pay for it, and only as valuable as you pretend it to be.
So try to make a profit, alright?
This game was created at DigiPen Institute of Technology as an exploration into open dialogue mechanics and potential new games that can be created using language models, taking inspiration from text-based adventure games from history.
All programming, music, art, and writing was made by a real human and designed with intent, and AI is only used at the runtime of the game to generate text.
Ethics
The ongoing social, economic and environmental issues surrounding generative AI are important to be aware of and should be considered prior to playing this game. This includes generative AI’s current effect on the games industry.
While Outbound Sales is almost entirely reliant on a language model, there is nothing that could have been done by a human being that was created by generative AI. This means that all sprites, music, writing, design, and programming was done by hand.
AI is only being used to generate natural language responses at runtime—which was previously impossible—and does not replace or displace human design.
I’d like to prove that there are new systems that can be made using a language model’s ability to make subjective observations and speculative decisions about a block of text.
(I even wrote a little research paper about it!) Having an open dialogue system in a game environment allows for a new type of interactivity, specifically opportunities for players to say ANYTHING they want within the context of the game. Which is neat, but doesn’t really matter if it’s not fun.
