Last week, the Guardian spoke to the team behind Lili, a video game retelling of Macbeth, shown at the Cannes film festival. The headline quote from the piece was "Shakespeare would be writing for games today", which I have heard many times, and does make a lot of sense. Shakespeare worked in the Elizabethan theatre, a period in which plays were considered popularist entertainment hardly worthy of analysis or preservation – just like video games today! The authorities were also concerned about the lewd and violent nature of plays and the effect they may have on the impressionable masses – ditto! But if we agree that a 21st-century Shakespeare would be making games, what sort would he be making?

Language agents have shown impressive problem-solving skills within defined settings and brief timelines. Yet, with the ever-evolving complexities of open-world simulations, there's a pressing need for agents that can flexibly adapt to complex environments and consistently maintain a long-term memory to ensure coherent actions. To bridge the gap between language agents and open-world games, we introduce Language Agent for Role-Playing (LARP), which includes a cognitive architecture that encompasses memory processing and a decision-making assistant, an environment interaction module with a feedback-driven learnable action space, and a postprocessing method that promotes the alignment of various personalities. The LARP framework refines interactions between users and agents, predefined with unique backgrounds and personalities, ultimately enhancing the gaming experience in open-world contexts. Furthermore, it highlights the diverse uses of language models in a range of areas such as entertainment, education, and various simulation scenarios. The project page is released at https://miao-ai-lab.github.io/LARP/.

Assassin's Creed and Total War have proven that video games can be better than any tattered textbook at bringing history alive – though they do tend to retread the same old battlegrounds of western Europe. China's Everstone Studio is hoping to change that, letting players loose on an open world 10th-century China in its debut game, Where Winds Meet. Here, we are put into the sandals of a nameless young martial artist and transported back to the dramatic fall of the Southern Tang dynasty, where the sudden poisoning of Emperor Li Yu thrusts our hero into a dangerous new world. Despite its indie origins, Where Winds Meet looks like a game with a big budget behind it, drawing comparisons to Sucker Punch's multimillion dollar samurai epic Ghosts of Tsushima. Its sprawling depiction of southern China is a sight to behold; comb through the gameplay videos and you'll see its hero roaming across a luscious countryside one minute, stumbling upon a serene wildlife-filled pond the next and then being pursued by bandits after dark, dodging arrows on rain-soaked rooftops.

One of the more famous scenes in recent video-game history can be found at the beginning of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, from 2017. The player's avatar, Link, starts on a plateau high above the land of Hyrule. It's a test zone in which to familiarize oneself with the mechanics of the game. But a paraglider tool, obtained at the end of the introduction, makes it possible to leave the plateau behind and enter the rest of the environment. After exiting a cavern, Link stands at the lip of a cliff, and the camera pans out to survey the vast landscape, a patchwork of forests, rolling hills, seas of fog, and darkened mountains. Like Simba in "The Lion King," the player gets the sense that everything the light touches is her kingdom, a sprawling natural world explorable from end to end.

It's clear how the Viking raids in Assassin's Creed Valhalla are supposed to work. Ubisoft's latest historical adventure has you playing as a brave Norse warrior rampaging across England with your fellow raiders, battling Saxon soldiers and ransacking their burning cities. That's not how I play. I discovered early on that, instead of approaching an enemy site in my longship, with all my skilled courageous troops, then engaging in open, bloody warfare, I had more success if I went ahead alone and hid in the bushes, picking the guards off one by one and quietly hiding their bodies. You can clear out a whole town without a scratch, and then your fearsome warriors can pop in at the end and help you open the treasure chests.

The ongoing covid-19 pandemic placed a brighter-than-usual spotlight on gaming in 2020, with an isolated population looking for entertainment they could enjoy from the safety of home. How fortunate then that alongside the year's many maladies, 2020 also delivered some of the most memorable games in recent years. From laid-back life simulators to an anticipated sequel that scrutinized cyclical violence, the gaming world was replete with options for anyone who wanted to get their minds off the consistently grim reality around them. The reintroduction and reimagination of the classic "Final Fantasy VII" highlighted the early spring, while the November debut of the PlayStation 5 ushered in a next-generation hero the gaming world both needed and deserved. Even with multiple delays pushing the much-anticipated "Cyberpunk 2077" beyond our Dec. 1 cutoff for Game of The Year consideration, there was no shortage of worthy contenders for that title.

It can be difficult to find time to finish a video game, especially if you only have a few hours a week to play. In our biweekly column Short Play we suggest video games that can be started and finished in a weekend. I was really into playing open-world games when the genre was still new. While I didn't complete everything in those early Assassin's Creed games, or in the original Crackdown or Infamous, I did spend a lot of time doing pretty much everything the games had to offer. These days, however, I find it pretty difficult to devote enough time to finish the main quest line of an open-world game, never mind the additional stuff.

E3's wide variety of games in development includes creations that offer players an alternative from the typical action-adventures and online battles. LOS ANGELES -- Hundreds of video games are headed toward TVs, console systems, computer displays and mobile devices in the coming months. Of course, that means impending releases from longtime favorite franchises such as "The Legend of Zelda,""Star Wars" and "Call of Duty" and new takes on beloved characters including "Marvel's Avengers." But the breadth of games in development includes many creations that will offer players an alternative from the typical wave of action-adventures and online battles. Here's a quartet of quirky, offbeat treats uncovered from the array on display at the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which wrapped up here earlier this week.

The new game from Mojang answers the eternal question, what if Minecraft and Gauntlet had a baby? Minecraft: Dungeons is a brand-new game inspired by classic dungeon crawlers like Wizardry and Ultima Underworld, and it turns the series' traditional formula on its head. Instead of providing a vast, open canvas where players can let their imaginations run wild, Dungeons is an adventure game filled with discrete quests, characters, items and enemies. It still looks like classic Minecraft fare, complete with cube-headed characters and 3D swords with jagged, pixelated blades. While players are free to explore this new blocky universe, Dungeons is decidedly not an open-world game.

There's a story I tell, when people ask why I love The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Basically, I found a shield. But it's how I found that shield that came to define my love for Morrowind. I was walking through a barren wasteland, a place I'd visited probably a dozen times, but this time I took a different route--only to find an unassuming door built into a rock formation. A tomb, and at the end of it, mounted high on the wall where you might think it was just part of the scenery, was Eleidon's Ward--the best shield in Morrowind.