As a teenager, Veronika Megler was intent on becoming a statistician. She signed up for a computer science course at Melbourne University, reasoning it would assist her chosen career. "I think there were four women in a class of about 220 people, and it was pretty misogynistic," she recalls. Megler had already built her own PC, buying the motherboard, chips, capacitors and diodes from an electronics shop in Melbourne. "In the store they'd say'tell your boyfriend we don't have these'," she recalls.

Yes, you read that right. Where all games are limited by what developers program, this game uses OpenAI to create infinitely generated worlds that are only limited by your imagination. If that sounds lofty, well, give it a try. I promise that you'll be amused. AI Dungeon 2 gives you a few different settings and roles that you can adopt, but from there, it pretty much lets you run wild.

Imagine a game where your world infinitely creates itself, you can keep exploring tirelessly, and continuously experience new content and adventures. Welcome to AI Dungeon 2, developed by Nick Walton who creates AI-generated adventures. The icing on the cake, the game also enables players to select any action they desire, without being constricted to what the developers created. This is a one-of-a-kind AI-generated text adventure that took Walton "hundreds of hours" to complete. AI Dungeon 2 is done!

When I read Ender's Game, one of the parts that most stuck with me was the delightfully creepy Mind Game–a game designed to probe the player's subconcious. In the book, we learn that the Mind Game isn't actually programmed–it's powered by an AI that makes up the gameplay as it goes, reacting to the player's decisions and getting progressively more surreal. Ender's Game was written in 1985, and since then AI has actually gotten pretty good at creative tasks since then. The real-time graphics of something like the Mind Game are probably still out of reach, but what about something simpler like a text adventure? I decided to try writing a game like this by training GPT-2, a state-of-the-art predictive text model, on some transcripts of classic text advetnures.

Games have long been used as testbeds and benchmarks for artificial intelligence, and there has been no shortage of achievements in recent months. Google DeepMind's AlphaGo and poker bot Libratus from Carnegie Mellon University have both beaten human experts at games that have traditionally been hard for AI – some 20 years after IBM's DeepBlue achieved the same feat in chess. Games like these have the attraction of clearly defined rules; they are relatively simple and cheap for AI researchers to work with, and they provide a variety of cognitive challenges at any desired level of difficulty. By inventing algorithms that play them well, researchers hope to gain insights into the mechanisms needed to function autonomously. With the arrival of the latest techniques in AI and machine learning, attention is now shifting to visually detailed computer games – including the 3D shooter Doom, various 2D Atari games such as Pong and Space Invaders, and the real-time strategy game StarCraft.

Welcome back to Gaming IRL, a monthly segment where several editors talk about what they've been playing in their downtime. This month, we've enjoyed (to varying degrees) two flavors of Final Fantasy, explored Fullbright's new game, Tacoma, and lost ourselves in a "button-tapping mash-up between an idle-clicker and a text adventure." To open proceedings, UK Bureau Chief Mat Smith talks about how, when it comes to Final Fantasy XII, third time's a charm. My Final Fantasy completion list (barring those pesky online ones, pschh) had one glaring omission: the (ironically rather MMORPG-styled) Final Fantasy XII. Now that it's arrived on PS4, I got another chance to strike that iteration off the list -- and as they say, third time's the charm.

When Jim Crawford released a browser game named Frog Fractions in 2012, half the people who played it called him a genius; the rest thought he was deranged. What most of them seemed to agree on however, was that they loved it. When influential site Rock Paper Shotgun covered the game, it did so under the header: "Frog Fractions might be the greatest game of all time". Unpredictable and absurd, Frog Fractions starts out under the guise of a piece of edutainment software in which you control a frog sat on a pond scooping up bugs and defending fruit. Then after buying a few upgrades, you're suddenly riding a dragon through an underground tunnel that takes you into Crawford's own bizarre version of video game wonderland.