Pod Insights Equity Podcast AI-driven gaming with Hilary Mason from Hidden Door About this episode Today, we’re bringing you a special mini episode led by TechCrunch senior reporter and co-host of our sister podcast, Found, Dominic Madori-Davis. During this year’s Disrupt, Dom caught up with Hilary Mason from Hidden Door, an AI-driven narrative game engine. Dom and Hilary got into how generative AI is changing online gaming, building a team of creatives, fundraising in the gaming space, and more.
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Transcript 0:11 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a TechCrunch podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and this is our interview show, where we sit down with a guest, think about their work, and unpack the rest. Today, we are bringing you a very special mini-episode led by TechCrunch Senior Reporter and co-host of our sister podcast, Found, Dominic Midori Davis. Now, during this year's Disrupt, Dom caught up with Hilary Mason from Hidden Door, an AI-driven narrative game engine. Dom and Hilary got into how generative AI is changing online gaming, building a team of creatives, and fundraising in the gaming space. Now, this is an intersection
0:52 Speaker 00 of technologies that I am personally very excited about. I love games, I think AI is super cool, and I'm very curious to know where AI, in the current context, will find purchase inside of modern games. So, let's tune in.
1:09 Speaker 01 Hi, everyone. This is Dominic Midori Davis, one of the co-hosts of Found, and we are live, as you can hear, from TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. I'm here today with Hillary Mason from Hidden Door. How are you?
1:22 Speaker 02 I'm great. How are you doing today?
1:24 Speaker 01 I'm doing good. You know, it's not bad. SF weather, sunny.
1:28 Speaker 02 It's gorgeous.
1:29 Speaker 01 Talk to me about Hidden Door.
1:31 Speaker 02 So, what we do at Hidden Door is take any work of fiction, like a book, a TV show, or a movie, and we make it a playable social role-playing game automatically. So, for players, if you're the kind of person who reads a book and you keep thinking about it, or you watch a show and you want to yell at the TV, this is a way for you to come into those worlds and be able to direct your own stories in those worlds automatically. So, our players make their characters, they can play with their friends and family, and they get to direct the kinds of stories they want to play. And it is a game. It plays very much like a tabletop role-playing game with those sorts of dynamics. And it comes together as a dynamic webcomic that you see as you make choices that's generated
2:16 Speaker 02 just for you. And on the content side, for our authors and our other content partners, they're able to take the book they wrote or the show they made and create a new experience for their fans where their fans can get really immersed in the worlds that they've fallen in love with and get excited for what might be next. So we're finding a lot of excitement there.
2:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, I saw that like Netflix had something where they had like some TV show and it was like you can have your own experience in it. And you know what I'm talking about was like interactive and stuff. And I remember thinking like, how do you do that? Like, how do you build out a world like this where you can direct the story?
2:49 Speaker 02 Well, I think you're referring to Bandersnatch, which was a really interesting experiment where they actually gave you a bunch of paths you could follow and you could choose what would happen next. But even that was pre-written content. So there was a team there who created all of the potential endings ahead of time. And then the players or the viewers sort of got to pick how they wanted to navigate through and how they wanted to experience it. It's really cool. What we do at Hidden Door is a little bit different because there is no pre-written content. The whole thing is something that can be directed by the player. We also are a little bit different in that we've invested heavily in the idea of a controllable story
3:30 Speaker 02 engine. And so our authors are able to set rules that are consistent in how their worlds are experienced by their players. So what happens at the end is a story that's a collaboration between the original author, the system, and what the system is capable of, and then the player and their choices. And it's completely unique and there's no pre-scripted content at all.
3:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's so cool. So how do you choose the stories that you let people play with?
3:57 Speaker 02 So we partner directly with the writers. So we license their work. We make sure they're getting paid and we make sure they approve of everything we do.
4:05 Speaker 01 Oh, my goodness. Is there like a dream story or a dream author you would love to work with?
4:09 Speaker 02 There are so many. I am a big sci-fi nerd. And so one that I keep coming back to is Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan that got made into a TV show. I think it was on Netflix. Like so, but I'm not sure this year. But mainly, I think what's really fun about these stories is that you're either able to like sort of explore and poke at new aspects of a world. So you can go to places you haven't seen before. And any world in which it's not really about a drama happening in one character's head, but it's a world that you want to explore, works really well. Other ones that I'd love to see are Bridgerton, for example, like where there's sort of relationship based drama and a lot of status games to play. Yeah, I could keep going, but there are a lot of fun things out there.
4:53 Speaker 01 I was gonna ask which genres lend best to it, or like, is there like a Pride and Prejudice one? Or is it?
4:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's on our list. We haven't done it yet, but yes, there will be. And I would say that broadly, we sort of think of it as sort of like action based plots, exploration based plots, and then what I'll call drama, but that's, it could be politics, it could be sort of social climbing, it could be creating and like becoming the mayor of something, or it could be falling in love, is sort of those dramatic kinds of plots. And all of those things work well. What doesn't work well are things that require deep, detailed factual knowledge of the real world, or stories that take place entirely inside someone's head. So those are things we're not as excited about.
5:37 Speaker 01 And can you talk to me about the AI component within Hidden Door?
5:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this is only possible because of the AI system. And I think it gives us too real affordances. What's really exciting for our players is that they can have a game that plays like a tabletop role playing game, where to do that right now, you generally need a person to invest a whole bunch of time in creating and guiding you through a story. You need to buy a bunch of books, learn a bunch of rules. You probably need to spend, at least when I played a lot, it's been like four hour sessions around a table. And it's incredibly fun, but something that is such a big time and energy commitment that it's really not as accessible. And so. Using our technology gives you that play experience,
6:24 Speaker 02 but in a way where you can pick it up and play for 30 minutes with your friends. Nobody has to do the homework. You can put it down again. And then on the content side, it allows us to take, say, a novel and create that world to play in in a matter of hours or days. Whereas game development typically would take 12 to 18 months around a property without the underlying tech.
6:46 Speaker 01 What has it been like fundraising this idea? Like, how do you, how do you break this down to investors?
6:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's been a really interesting fundraising journey. And I want to say we've been incredibly fortunate in the folks we've gotten to work with. But it definitely has changed from three and a half, nearly four years ago, when we started this company and GPT-2 came out while we were thinking about it. And we'd come in and people would be like, you know, you're doing what? Or last year, when we raised our seed, it was definitely all about like, oh, are you putting NFTs in this because you could raise more? And so we'd had to come in and explain what the underlying capability was, and then explain the game on top of it and the business model. And now everybody knows the capability is interesting. And people have sort of caught on to the idea that what we now call generative AI
7:33 Speaker 02 is a set of fairly transformational capabilities. So it's almost gone too far the other way, where now there's a tremendous amount of hype around it. But I don't think the hype has caught up with the pragmatic common sense. And so now we get a lot of inbound, but I think it's actually quite shallow, which I probably shouldn't say, but, but it's true.
7:51 Speaker 01 No, yeah, because basically you've been pitching a product that had AI before it was like trendy to investors. So it's like three or four years ago. What were investors saying? Were they interested in the AI component?
8:03 Speaker 02 I'd say it was a mix. Like, we obviously got very lucky and found people who understood both the technology and the vision for the players that it opens up for us. But we had to do a lot of work coming into the room to explain what the tech was and what was possible and what it was good for. And what we were actually willing to claim was true and isn't true. And so, for example, we said in our very first pitch deck, our system is not creative. Our authors are creative. Creative, our players are creative. The system is essentially a combinatorial trope machine that those people can direct to create a really fun experience together. And I think coming to it, apart from the hype, sort of let us bring some people along. But I will say there were definitely rejections we got because people were just like,
8:47 Speaker 02 you know, you're a few weird nerds and I don't want to spend the time on it. Or I don't really see the business. Or we actually got one great rejection, which was if you do this, no one will ever stop playing it and you're going to destroy society. So I can't invest, which was my favorite rejection ever. I don't know if it was serious or not, but it was pretty funny to us.
9:05 Speaker 01 Whoa.
9:06 Speaker 02 But yeah, the landscape has changed a lot. And between our pre-seed and now, we also had this whole sort of divergence into the world of blockchain and games and blockchain and AI. And that's not what we're doing. So we sort of had to navigate that as well as something a little bit different.
9:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, how would you even put an NFT? Or how would you even use NFT? Because imagine if you would have did what that investor said. And now NFTs are like not cool anymore.
9:29 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, I'm a technologist and very much a pragmatist. And so, you know, when you do play our game, you do create unique items and characters and new locations and new things that have never really existed in the world before. And they're cool and you can share them. But they're, you know, honestly, they're each a line in our Postgres database. And we have one of them. And so folks would look at it and be like, oh, that could be an NFT. And, you know, we'd just say like, okay, why? You know, if we reach a point where that's what our players demand, sure. But we're definitely not seeing that utility yet. And I'm very glad we didn't go down that path and sort of stayed pragmatic.
10:05 Speaker 01 And I wanted to talk a little bit about what you were doing before Hidden Door, because you have a very sciencey background. You have this really extensive career. Why did you decide to pivot into gaming and AI?
10:15 Speaker 02 Yeah, I have to admit, I've been a gamer my whole life. So this was a passion already. But you're right, I've been working in machine learning and data science for 20 years. If you count my detour as being a computer science professor. And my last company was called Fast Forward Labs. And we did applied machine learning research and product code development, largely with Fortune 500 partners. So very much an enterprise company. Customers paid us for access to our research and then sometimes we'd build stuff with them as well. But we did work in natural language generation in 2014. We did work in summarization with deep learning in 2015 and abstractive summarization. And I could not get essentially how much fun the things you could build with this were out of my head.
10:59 Speaker 02 And so when my co-founder and I were, you know, we knew we wanted to work together. We had an inkling that it would be in this technical space, but we really started playing around with many, honestly, many different product ideas. And the one that just seemed to be both the most interesting, like basically was the thing that we wanted. Like the thing we couldn't get out of our heads was to create this kind of gaming experience. And the rest of it came after that. And we also started thinking about safety and controllability. And we realized that standard LLM architectures, again, at the time it was GPT-2 leading up to GPT-3, would not give us those things. And so we built a very different architecture. We do use some LLMs under the hood, but we built it around that controllability,
11:41 Speaker 02 which now gives us the ability to work with content partners and give them confidence that their worlds are going to be what they want it to be. So it came together piece by piece, but it was just that obsession with play and the obsession with the tech.
11:54 Speaker 01 And we don't have much time left, and I really wanted to get to this. So how big is your company now?
11:59 Speaker 02 We are 14 people.
12:00 Speaker 01 14 people. How would you describe yourself as a leader?
12:06 Speaker 02 I think pragmatic, direct and hopefully focused and maybe a little bit chaotic. My job as a leader is to build the machine that builds our product and business. And we've pulled together a team of folks from gaming and entertainment, from machine learning, and somehow, three and a half years in, have gotten us all to work together. And so I think it really comes down to that.
12:27 Speaker 01 Do you have any tips on how other founders can kind of foster positive workplace environments and keep everyone energized to work for you?
12:35 Speaker 02 I mean, I think it's having a lot of clarity, over-communicating, especially if you're working remote. And just being a good human being does a lot of it.
12:45 Speaker 01 What would you say is one challenge that you've experienced while building and scaling this company that taught you a lot about being a founder and an entrepreneur?
12:54 Speaker 02 I have many challenges. I can pick a ton of them. The one that I'll probably mention for this audience is just that when you're a founder, your job is everything and it's nothing. So your job is to focus on what's most important, make sure everyone knows what that is, and then try and build the team such that you don't have to do that work anymore. And it means that you have to give up a lot. So like, there are areas of our product that I built myself, like in our very first prototype, and I've had to take my hands off and step away and let people who are frankly able to think about it all the time and better at it than I am come in and carry it forward. I think that one's been one that's hard for me to learn.
13:31 Speaker 01 And that actually was something I wanted to ask you regarding the AI element. How do you train your algorithm? And because I'm wondering, how does the bias in AI conversation kind of intersect with your company?
13:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. So again, we started around this idea of safety and controllability. And that actually did come from, I think, a fairly robust background and set of values around building ethical systems that don't discriminate. And LLMs do magnify the bias in the underlying data, and they are not controllable, like by nature. And so I don't want to go into our whole infrastructure, but we essentially have pre-generated, have humanized on most of the pre-generated content. And then we use additional machine learning systems, which are, by the way, a mix of language models and then other things like homegrown models, to be able to contextualize and color it and create what the player sees.
14:23 Speaker 02 So in essence, we have players' input in text, we structured in our game engine, and we use that to generate what comes out the other side. So we have a lot of control, and that allows us to control for bias, among other things. And that's really, really important when you build products with this tech.
14:38 Speaker 01 And I actually have two more questions really quick, because I'm really curious. So you only work with like authors and books? Or can you also adapt, like, I don't know, Broadway musicals?
14:47 Speaker 02 Anything.
14:47 Speaker 01 Okay.
14:48 Speaker 02 We've never done a musical, though.
14:49 Speaker 01 Ooh, okay.
14:50 Speaker 02 That's a great idea.
14:51 Speaker 01 That'll be really fun. Last question, what's next?
14:55 Speaker 02 So we are launching in November. And if anyone listening wants to play, go to hidden door.co. And then we are really focusing on building an amazing player experience from there. And you will see us work with a whole bunch of different kinds of content over the next year and see what people love. That's so exciting. Thank you for stopping by. Thank you.
15:15 Speaker 00 Thanks again to Dom and Hillary for that conversation. I am very excited about our very fun gaming future. But don't forget, in the meantime, to check out our sister podcast, Found. For more from the TechCrunch Podcast Network, also check out at TechCrunch Pods on TikTok. And of course, as you know, we are Equity Pod on both X and Threads. All right, that's all from us. Bye.
15:39 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, Editor in Chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch Senior Reporter, Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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