Minecraft remains remarkably popular about a decade after it was first released, thanks to a unique blend of quirky gameplay and open-world building capabilities.
A knock-off called Oasis, released last month, captures much of the flavor of the original game with a notable and strange twist. The entire game is not generated by a game engine and hand-coded rules, but by an AI model that devises every frame.
Oasis was built by an Israeli AI startup called Decart in collaboration with Etched, a custom silicon design company, to demonstrate the potential of hardware optimized for current transformer-based AI algorithms.
Oasis uses a transformative AI model, similar to the one that powers a large language model – apparently trained only on endless examples of people playing Minecraft, to come up with each new video frame in response to the previous one and to process user input such as clicks or mouse movements . Oasis is similar to a video generating model like Sora, except a user can control its output.
You can play Oasis online for free and it's both fascinating and surreal to explore. In addition to being home to bizarre artifacts, like deformed livestock and stairs that go nowhere, the game has an astonishing, Inception-esque quality. Because each frame is generated based on what the AI model thinks should come after the frame it's currently seeing, the in-game world is never completely stable and will happily shift and change with a little push. For example, if you stare too closely at a texture, when you look back up, the block world in front of you may be completely different from the world you last saw.
It is also possible to upload your own image for Oasis to work with. I tried to add a photo of my cat, Leona, and the game turned her into a beautiful blocky landscape (unfortunately no cat character in the game, but whatever…).
Oasis has become a viral hit with people exploring ways to make the AI engine hallucinate new environments. Sometimes it can even be tricked into teleporting you to a dark moonscape that resembles The End of Minecraft. Tellingly, this generative AI project is not entirely original, but rather appears to be a bizarre copy of the world's most popular game (it was trained on an open source Minecraft dataset from OpenAI).
“People are trying to teleport to different worlds and run fast,” said Robert Wachen, Chief Operating Officer at Etched. “It's one of the main reasons it went viral.”
Oasis' AI approach is too inconsistent and uncontrollable to be useful for a conventional game, says Julian Togelius, a professor of computer science at New York University. Generative AI has future potential for controlling in-game characters and perhaps generating scenes or worlds, he says, but it's early days. “It's very interesting and impressive technology, but right now it's an answer in search of a question,” Togelius says.
Frank Lantz, a game designer and director of the game design department at New York University, says Oasis seems to be trapped in a kind of uncanny valley that prevents it from actually being fun to play. But he suggests that an enterprising young game designer might be able to figure out a way to turn that game into one that people love. “This is so obviously cool and interesting,” he says.
