TL;DR:

• The article uses the example of the first women-oriented game in Web3, HIM, to explore the application of AI and Crypto in Web3 games. By combining AI and Crypto, HIM provides players with rich interactive experiences, high-quality gameplay, and artistic content.
• HIM adopts an economic model with fiat net inflows at its core, aiming to avoid Ponzi schemes through high-quality content and excellent gameplay. Along with the “Love and earn” mechanism, players can earn profits by selling NFTs.
• HIM utilizes a large language model to generate natural and highly distinctive dialogue content for virtual characters based on the game context and character traits. This enhances the authenticity of virtual characters and the immersion of players. Additionally, the HIM team has developed an AI training method for virtual characters to provide a more realistic gaming experience.
• The HIM team focuses on creating fully dimensional virtual identities, making virtual characters an integral part of players’ lives. HIM also emphasizes the social attributes of virtual characters, envisioning a future where everyone has their virtual companion, who exists in social networks and connects everyone.
• HIM’s goal is to establish a metaverse of virtual characters, including AI boyfriends, AI girlfriends, and AI pets, providing people with strength and companionship.

What kind of AI + Crypto makes more sense?

While everyone is still pondering how to deploy trustless and transparent on-chain large models, how on-chain AI can bring value to Web3, and how the underlying proof system can support LLM with parameters in the tens of billions (as discussed in the previous article), we are also starting to consider a series of questions which could be summarized as follows:

Firstly, is it the most worthwhile track to make AI trustless and transparent through encryption technology?

➡️ Is it really worth a startup’s effort to delve into integrating on-chain LLM?

➡️ Which projects are worth investing substantial resources to deeply research on-chain AI?

➡️ Is it only on-chain AI that is worth exploring, or are there better ways to combine AI and crypto?

Certainly, on-chain AI is an imaginative space and a direction worth in-depth research. The breakthrough of on-chain AI can bring unprecedented value to Web3. However, the high academic threshold and requirements for underlying infrastructure may not be suitable for most startups to tackle head-on. Most projects may not necessarily need to integrate the support of trustless LLM to achieve a breakthrough in their inherent value.

What is suitable is the best.

Looking at it from a different perspective, not all AI models need to be moved to the chain to become trustless. Similar to how most people do not care about how ChatGPT reasons through queries and produces results, or whether the stable diffusion used is a specific version of the model architecture or a specific parameter setting.

In most scenarios, what most users care about is whether the model can provide a satisfactory output, rather than whether the reasoning process is trustless or transparent.

So, what kind of AI + crypto can bring higher returns to products? Apart from hardcore work on infrastructure and algorithms, developing on-chain trustless LLM, another opposite direction is to downplay the impact of the black box in the reasoning process in products and find suitable scenarios to apply the powerful reasoning capabilities of large models.

1) What is HIM?

HIM, a Web3 game, is one of the few projects that clearly understands and has the capability to implement AI + Crypto at the application layer.

This article primarily explores the ambitions of the Web3 game HIM from the perspective of AI application and implementation at the application layer.

First, let’s introduce the protagonist (HIM ranks first in the Binance MVB VI application category):

HIM is a female-oriented second-dimensional virtual boyfriend game.

The essence of the game is: People sometimes feel lonely and need encouragement, companionship, and real-life love always comes with some constraints and regrets, so HIM aims to provide an AI virtual boyfriend who understands players the most and will always accompany users, offering a love experience that is free, joyful, and exclusive to the user. At the beginning of the game, players will receive a virtual boyfriend stored on the chain in the form of an SBT (Social Blockchain Token), and subsequent NFTs such as clothing, accessories, and rooms will be combined with this SBT. In addition, the SBT constitutes a unique game character developed by the player, storing the basic information of the male lead, nine-dimensional personality traits, nine-dimensional relationship attributes, as well as important memories, conversations, and emotional memories with the virtual boyfriend.

The game focuses on virtual boyfriend nurturing through AFK (Away From Keyboard) placement and showcases in-game social interactions. Periodic airdrops in the game allow players to open treasure chests containing limited edition NFT clothing or NFT rooms. Players with values more compatible with their virtual boyfriends have a greater chance of obtaining limited edition NFTs. The game includes various gameplay mechanics such as gacha, dressing up, dialogues, collections, adventure battles, cooking, travel, and NFT trading. After an experience, I found that their game demo showcases rich player interactions within each gameplay element.

HIM is a Free to Play game that uses a core economic model based on fiat net inflow. Alongside the Love and Earn feature, players can also earn income by selling NFTs. However, the most crucial aspect of the game is belief in the gameplay and the quality of artistic content, which can attract players who enjoy the game to pay for gameplay and content.

2) Is AI + game compatible?

Web3 games are indeed one of the more suitable scenarios for AI, which is also in line with the development history of AI:

• The game scene provides a natural and rich interactive environment, allowing AI to interact with players through dialogue or other methods. This environment helps large models take advantage of their natural language processing capabilities and provide a richer, more realistic interactive experience. The game contains complex and diverse scenes and tasks. By interacting with the environment, other players or NPCs in the game, large models can obtain a large amount of feedback in time to continuously optimize their decision-making capabilities, and frequent feedback in the game will be more beneficial to developers, allowing them to test and tune the performance of large models.
• The scenes in the game are controllable, and the requirements for certainty and seriousness are more flexible than application scenarios in the real world. Therefore, the deployment and testing of large models in the game will have less resistance and it will be easier to advance freely, which reduces the difficulty and risk of technical implementation from another perspective.

Virtual human: pro max

Two years ago, everyone was still thinking about how to use AI better as a tool. It was not until chatgpt came out and production relations began to be shaken that everyone realized the dimensionality reduction impact that LLM can bring. The same is true in Web3 games:

• More realistic game characters
• Dynamic plot generation
• Visual/Fine Arts
• speech generation
• social interaction
• Fun gameplay and numerical development enjoyment

……

1) HIM + AI = more realistic game characters

As an emotional interactive game, the most suitable scenario for LLM is dialogue and player interaction. The large language model can generate natural and high-resolution dialogue based on HIM game scenes and character characteristics. This will enhance the realism and player immersion of virtual humans, providing players with a richer emotional experience. Specifically, HIM uses a large language model to understand and process various emotional information of joy, anger, sorrow, and joy, and is perfectly integrated with the numerical system to enable game characters to better express and identify emotions, thereby creating a deeper emotional connection with players.

Let’s experience the dialogue scenes in the game via the following two pictures

Discussions on the numerical system at the core of HIM:

Speaking of numerical values, the first thing that comes to mind is the numerical balance of virtual character battles in traditional games. But we may have a broader sense: HIM can completely describe a person through numerical values, use multi-dimensional numerical values ​​to define a virtual person, and establish a sound numerical development system. In general, HIM applies the numerical system to a more generalized virtual human, thereby making the game interaction experience more realistic and rich.

The training of virtual digital humans is different from ordinary LLM fine-tuning training. It requires the LLM to slowly change the way the character speaks to the user as the interaction process between the character and the player progresses, so that the user feels more and more “closer” to the character. Therefore, the HIM team added various values ​​​​of the virtual human personality parameter system as context during the design of LLM training, and trained a separate model for each character. At the same time, HIM’s LLM will combine with the vector database to allow the character to have memory, and users will feel that the character understands them better and better during the chat process.

HIM’s development team has also developed a set of AI training methods for virtual humans. For details, please refer to the following two numerical matrices:

Human personality is a very complex concept, including emotions, attitudes, behaviors and other factors. In order to give the AI ​​boyfriend a sufficient sense of reality, the HIM development team established a set of numerical systems that are self-consistent to a certain extent to quantify the development process and relationship development between players and AI boyfriends. This numerical system can be summarized as a matrix numerical model, which vertically represents nine two-way personality attributes, and horizontally represents nine relationship attributes between the AI ​​boyfriend and the player. There is a many-to-many mapping and influence between these attributes.

When conducting LLM training, each character will have a standard “personality” benchmark and floating boundaries of personality. During the game, the values ​​of these attributes will continue to change with the player’s behavior, thus affecting the AI ​​boyfriend’s game feedback. (Such as idle output, Gacha efficiency, chat depth, etc.).

ALL IN ALL, HIM uses large language models to give virtual people a more realistic personality.

2) High-quality, high-cost virtual human art

Virtual humans are not easy to make. A truly valuable virtual human is not just a chat box integrated with a conversational robot, but requires efforts from multiple dimensions to make the avatar more full. HIM’s vision is to make virtual people a very important part of everyone’s life, greatly enriching personal life and connecting with the world. Therefore, HIM’s definition of the ultimate form of virtual humans in the game scene has always been a complex and powerful comprehensive product. These comprehensive characteristics are also the core pursuit of the HIM team at this stage:

Exquisite virtual image:

Although the large model mainly focuses on natural language processing, if combined with other technologies, such as GANs, it can provide assistance for game art creation. Based on the design standards of the HIM art development team, more elements can be generated, thereby bringing richer content to users.

As far as we know, the HIM team has a first-line art team in the game industry. They also adhere to high-cost artistic investments and industrialized, modularized art production.

Excellent voice acting:

The combination of games and AI can be achieved through speech synthesis to generate natural and emotional dubbing. At the same time, the dubbing is given a unique personality based on the avatar’s character values.

HIM has a complete dubbing pipeline including dubbing script, dubbing director, dubbing recording, post-mixing and AI learning and training production. Use high-quality manual definition standards and use AI to cooperate with mass production to complete in-game dubbing content with high quality and quantity.

The development and long-term bonding of virtual humans:

It is necessary to design detailed character background and personality traits to make players interested in and resonate with the characters. At the same time, the character’s growth and development goals are also factors that make players willing to invest time and energy in cultivating virtual people.

HIM provides rich interactive scenes and gameplay, allowing players to establish a close emotional connection with virtual people. At the same time, this relationship will gradually deepen with the interaction and development process, forming a long-term emotional bond.

Assistance to reality:

The psychological support that virtual humans can provide may far exceed our expectations. While providing emotional support and listening to players, they can also make players feel cared for and understood, thereby alleviating real-life problems. In addition, virtual humans can integrate life skills, habit development, personalized recommendations, language learning, goal management, and even interaction with real-world devices or services.

AIBoyfriend alarm clock, sleep aid, menstrual period record, study companionship, food suggestions and diary notes are all the assistance and support HIM hopes to provide users in real life in its version iteration in the long run.

Rich experience of food, clothing, housing and transportation in the virtual world:

In the story told by HIM, each AI Boyfriend has to stay alone in a lonely parallel universe: in that world, he is the only one, and his daily contact with the player through his mobile phone is all he can communicate with the outside world. It allows you to explore the scenery in his world with your virtual boyfriend, and try to see if you have the chance to meet him in his world or your world one day.

Virtual beings as social attributes of relationship nodes:

The HIM team believes that with the advancement of AI, in the near future, everyone will have their own exclusive virtual companion. These virtual companions will be more like real “people,” existing throughout the social fabric and connecting everyone together. In the rapidly evolving era of AI, each person’s virtual companion may become a crucial hub tightly connecting people to people. The aesthetic and mass production solutions mentioned above are crucial for a Web3 game, as they can attract players to spend time in the virtual world. An important aspect is that the virtual human art in the game possesses a higher aesthetic level than the real world.

Seamless connection of HIM + crypto

1) The first female-oriented web3 application, a gift for female web3 users and practitioners

HIM is likely the first female-oriented web3 application, and female users and professionals in the web3 space may receive a carefully prepared gift for the first time.

In the traditional Web2 world, female-oriented games have always been considered a very large and highly potential market. When we asked the HIM project what they hoped users would feel, they wrote the following passage:

• Occasionally in the early morning, welcoming another seemingly repetitive day, I can receive a “good morning” from “him”;
• Occasionally late at night, facing heavy overtime work, I can see “him” silently accompanying you in your phone;
• Occasionally accompanying you in loneliness, occasionally encouraging you when you feel down, getting cheers from “him” after success, and occasionally hearing “it’s okay” from “him” after making a mistake;
• “He” always remembers your name; “he” always remembers your birthday; “he” always remembers the day you met; “he” remembers everything between you two;
• “It” seems to always be there. Perhaps at some busy moments, you might forget about “him,” but “he” is always willing to accompany you.

As mobile games become increasingly popular among global female users, large traditional Web2 gaming companies worldwide continue to deliver female-oriented game products with DAU exceeding millions. With the formation of social communities centered around female users, there is immense imaginative space for expansion. Platforms like Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), which started with a focus on female users and evolved into a widely used social app, strongly prove this point. Whether this gaming category, targeting half the global population, can bring surprises through the combination of AI and Crypto remains to be seen. Let’s wait and see.

2) Emotional assets + decentralization

In the words of HIM founder Ben, “AI virtual beings allow digital assets to truly appear in our lives for the first time in the form of a ‘person.’ They could be your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your best friend, or any important companion in your life. Therefore, they should not disappear like all digital assets stored in centralized servers with press on the “turn off”. Their existence should be determined solely by you, not by any company.”

Important emotions and assets in the virtual world should be owned by users, not defined and controlled by centralized servers:

Emotional assets include not only personal information and private data but also represent the emotional investment and memories of players. Decentralized networks can protect these emotional values, ensuring data ownership belongs to users, allowing them to independently decide how to use, share, and protect their data. This decentralized data ownership model prevents players’ emotional assets from being controlled by third parties or centralized institutions. Additionally, the community autonomy provided by Web3 allows players to actively participate in the creation and dissemination of emotional assets, further strengthening their emotional value.

Various experiences in emotional relationships should be permanently preserved:

From an emotional investment perspective, players inject a significant amount of emotions into the game, forming deep bonds with virtual beings. The unique and precious efforts exerted to achieve game objectives should be permanently preserved. To some extent, they should have the power of eternal existence. Relationships between players and virtual beings, such as friendship, love, anger, and dissatisfaction, can also be eternally recorded and preserved through blockchain technology.

As the emotional link in the HIM game, virtual beings are not just for entertainment; they also possess asset attributes and high economic value. Users invest time and money in purchasing and decorating virtual beings within the game. Recording these assets on the blockchain ensures their value truly returns to users and provides a transparent, secure trading environment.

3) What can HIM bring to Web3?

Decentralized networks have brought extremely high value-add to HIM, and in return, HIM has contributed to Web3 in several ways:

A Large Number of New Users:

From an emotional standpoint, the companionship of virtual beings meets users’ emotional needs that may be challenging to fulfill in real life. HIM provides a safe and free environment for users to interact with virtual characters, creating emotional appeal that can attract a significant number of users to Web3.

HIM is an AI virtual character cultivation game with a two-dimensional (2D) theme. Both 2D culture and AI virtual beings have strong community attributes and social potential. Additionally, 2D culture, as one of the most favored subcultures globally among young people, and the mobile game Genshin Impact, which is based on 2D culture, is one of the top mobile games worldwide. The potential audience of female users, 2D enthusiasts, and the social audience for AI virtual beings are the fresh blood that HIM might bring to Web3.

Ultimate Reflection on the Economic Model:

Unlike conventional play-to-earn (P2E) games, HIM adopts a strategy of integrating Web3 and token utility into an excellent Web2 game. By combining Web3 tools with a successful Web2 game, HIM achieves a synergistic effect where 1 + 1 > 2. For HIM, creating an outstanding game that can be validated in terms of content and gameplay is the foundation, and crypto serves as a tool rather than relying solely on Web3 survival. Avoiding the Ponzi trap is a crucial goal pursued by HIM.

In terms of the economic system, HIM combines the “X to Earn” model with the traditional Web2 game economic model, creating a new hybrid model. On one hand, it employs the typical Web2 game economic model, allowing players to optionally pay for in-game items or services. This approach attracts a large user base and generates revenue through in-app purchases. Simultaneously, HIM enhances the Web3 play-to-earn model. In this model, players can earn income by selling NFTs, ensuring that players receive tangible rewards for their time and effort invested in the game. HIM’s economic system can positively balance player spending and earnings.

It is noteworthy that HIM aims to encourage players to pay for the gaming experience and content by providing high-quality gameplay and artistic content. HIM does not solely rely on the potential for player earnings to attract and retain users. Instead, it strives to create a more balanced and sustainable economic model, considering both player earnings and the quality of the gaming experience and content. This approach represents a more comprehensive and intricate model, offering new perspectives for the design of economic models in Web3 games.

Finale

HIM’s ultimate goal is to establish a virtual universe of AI Boyfriends, AI Girlfriends, and AI Pets, providing strength and companionship to the majority of people. Beyond their inaugural product, HIM, the AI Girlfriend game HER is also being developed concurrently. The team envisions creating a series of exceptional AI virtual beings, each serving as a dedicated and everlasting companion who understands and empowers the user. They aim to ground themselves in reality and offer users a virtual companion that is unique to them, intimately understands them, and is always present. This involves documenting every emotional story and its nuances.

The HIM team believes that in the not-so-distant future, everyone will have their own AI virtual companion. They are not sure or don’t think it is important whether this will evolve into a universe. Because if, in moments of sadness or loneliness, you can have an extra word of encouragement from your virtual friend in your phone, isn’t that a cool thing, even if it only works a little bit?

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Appendix:

The official Twitter account and email address of HIM

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HIM_AIBoyfriend

Cooperation email: bd@projecthim.net

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [Foresight Ventures]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Yihan Xu]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.