“When They Come for Us”: Animal Protection Organization PETA Presents VR Game

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In the VR game “When They Came for Us”, run by animal protection organization PETA, a mirror is held up to humanity: the character is kidnapped and held captive by powerful aliens. He has seven minutes to convince the hostile aliens to release him using good arguments.

In this way, PETA wants to make players aware of the grievances in livestock farming, PETA’s creative director Christian Kössler wrote in a statement. “With our in-depth role we want to inspire a person to think about our treatment of animals and to explore a vegan lifestyle as a simple opportunity for positive change.”

Alien as AI conversation partner

PETA’s VR game is interesting Facebook’s existing VR glasses are available for free in the Meta Store From a technical point of view. For discussions with aliens, Peta does not rely on prefabricated dialogue trees, but on the AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT. Players speak their arguments into their microphones, ChatGPT processes the information and reacts to it using speech synthesis.

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This is similar to the concept that Studio Inworld is trying out with its tech demo “Inworld Origins”. Computer-controlled characters (NPCs) are “briefed” with certain parameters about what role they play in the game world and what knowledge they possess. Based on these inputs, they can freely respond to any statements and questions from the players.

Because traditional chat systems such as GPT chat can be reduced to absurdity relatively easily, video games with actual AI NPCs have been rare until now. PETA’s VR game “When They Came for Us” is one of the first ways to interact with an AI character.

Free gameplay and different outcomes

The game was developed by Hamburg creative agency Demodern, using the current ChatGPT4o model for AI answers. Because the AI ​​reacts dynamically to what players say, the developers promise a special depth of dialogue and a completely free course of the game that allows for different outcomes.

“We can hardly imagine the suffering that sentient beings in the animal industry suffer every day,” writes PETA creative director Christian Kössler. “That’s why we set out to embody a comparable situation for people through VR and AI.”

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