How Infinite Craft Captures the Chaos of the Internet…

For many years, the internet has been understood to be both a blessing and a curse. While it's been known to bring people together across the globe, the introduction of generative AI has led many to believe in the "dead internet theory," where most socialization platforms are artificially populated by AI chatbots. Denizens of the World Wide Web have rallied around the concept of creation and are defending its right to exist in retaliation. In the middle of this sits a small browser-based game called Infinite Craft.

Infinite Craft is a sandbox game made by Neal Agarwal where all the players have to work with are a few elemental words. The game uses a database of words connected with one another to tie concepts like "rainbow" and "fossil" together to create "dinosaur." If the Infinite Craft user manages to combine two elements that haven't been combined before, generative AI steps in and makes something up on the spot. This is what makes Agarwal's game so special, as it's a word association game that captures the creativity of the internet by simply having almost no limits.

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By Mohsen Baqery

How Infinite Craft Truly Lives Up To Its Name

Infinite Craft Players Can Make Literally Anything By Impulse Or Careful Thought

Even though Infinite Craft has tons and tons of words to mix and match, players have a wide, empty space at the start for the expansive sandbox. There aren't any tutorials to follow, so users are left to place words and see what they find. The beginning elements like "fire" and "water" quickly grow into a full collection of niche, specific terms like "tornado mummy" and even pop culture references like "Gandalf" for combining "Hobbit" and "smoke."

Neal Agarwal's game encourages fans to find a new word and immediately wonder what will happen if they merge a T-Rex with a dragon to make a "Dragon-rex," or if merging "richest" with "duck" will make Scrooge McDuck (which it does, just under "Scrooge," and adding another duck makes "Ducktales"). With the help of the AI database, combinations like "Dalek of Flowers" will appear for even the most impulsive combinations.

The database powering Infinite Craft perfectly captures the footprints of the internet through all of its players' impulsive or thoughtful decisions that lead to things like "Ducks of Edinburgh" or "Mega Mew-Shark." These AI-assisted combinations capture different types of humor seen on the web. The denizens of the internet have shared all sorts of things that capture all kinds of different feelings, from sharing important everyday moments with friends and family to memes like Skibidi Toilet.

Infinite Craft sets a great example of how generative AI is best used as a tool to enhance an experience rather than making it wholesale on its own. Without it managing to compute a new combination here and there, there's a chance the sandbox game wouldn't be anywhere as large as it is now. Players would have likely run out of combinations years ago, but at the very least, Neal.Fun has plenty of other games that they could have gone to instead.

At the same time, that same database wouldn't be as expansive, fun, or memorable without the human element behind the choices of each unscripted combination. As a result, Infinite Craft has a lot of funny combinations, and it can act as a beacon of creativity for users, be it thought-provoking or made out of a one-second impulse. It serves as an example that anyone can make anything at all if given the right outlet to do so. Other social platforms give users a place to express themselves, but many of them end up borderline gentrifying themselves away from deeper personal expression one way or another. Infinite Craft, however, is a silly little game that allows people to create almost anything within its limits and not against it, and that is what makes it so special.

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