Behind Infinite Craft, one of the internet's favourite time-killers, its creator wrangles with AI "alchemy"
Infinite Craft is a browser game with a simple premise. You begin with four elements – water, fire, wind, and earth – and combine two of them to make a new element. Water and fire make steam, steam and fire make an engine, steam and engine make a train. Before you know it, your bloodshot eyes behold a web of nebulas, political crises, philosophical concepts, and volcanoes (so many volcanoes!) sprawling across a conspiracy map that would make Charlie Kelly blush. But how did one man possibly prepare for all these combinations? Well, behind the curtains of Infinite Craft, an AI synthesises connections between your chosen elements and adds them to a global database. It's a game made by one man, informed by billions of minds, yet powered by no one at all.Amid rampant games industry layoffs, AI art in Square Enix games, and AI voice acting in The Finals, the thought of gamifying AI itself might rightly send a sensible shiver down your spine. But I think Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old develope
Infinite Craft is a browser game with a simple premise. You begin with four elements – water, fire, wind, and earth – and combine two of them to make a new element. Water and fire make steam, steam and fire make an engine, steam and engine make a train. Before you know it, your bloodshot eyes behold a web of nebulas, political crises, philosophical concepts, and volcanoes (so many volcanoes!) sprawling across a conspiracy map that would make Charlie Kelly blush. But how did one man possibly prepare for all these combinations? Well, behind the curtains of Infinite Craft, an AI synthesises connections between your chosen elements and adds them to a global database. It's a game made by one man, informed by billions of minds, yet powered by no one at all.
Amid rampant games industry layoffs, AI art in Square Enix games, and AI voice acting in The Finals, the thought of gamifying AI itself might rightly send a sensible shiver down your spine. But I think Neal Agarwal, a 26-year-old developer based in New York, deserves an open mind. Soft-spoken and musing with interest in my line of work, Agarwal radiates the airy thoughtfulness of someone you'd expect behind a game like Infinite Craft. With his broader body of work in view, it all makes even more sense. From vast visualisations of the deep sea to interactive trolley problems with increasingly absurd dilemmas, his website Neal.fun is an eclectic springboard of curiosity. If any project embodies him best, it's Internet Artifacts: a massive internet history museum whose interactive exhibits include '80s Usenet terminals, emulated browsers, and playable Flash games. Neal.fun is a tactile toybox, one so relentlessly jumbled that it almost eludes theme. I say almost, because beneath the miscellany lies an obsession with scale, new technologies, and nostalgia for a more playful chapter of the internet.
Infinite Craft feels like the final boss of Neal.fun. A playful repurposing of today's tech preoccupation, it draws its endless connections from the bottomless well of the internet. It's also his biggest and costliest project yet. "Last month was the most money I've ever spent in my life," he tells me with a winded smile. By licensing Meta's generative AI Llama 2 to produce the elements and connections, plus separate server hosting costs via TogetherAI, Infinite Craft racks up quite the maintenance bill. "It's breaking even now, so that's nice. It's not making money, but at least it's not losing any."
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