On December 26, 2023, Binance launched the Launchpool project Sleepless AI (AI), and HIM is the flagship virtual boyfriend game of Sleepless AI. It explores how to develop virtual boyfriend games through the combination of Crypto and AI.
1. What kind of AI + Crypto makes more sense?
Only suitable ones are the best.
1.1 What is HIM?
1.2 Does AI + games fit together?
2. Virtual people pro max
2.1 HIM + AI = more realistic game character personalities
2.2 High-quality, high-cost virtual human art
3. Seamless integration of HIM + crypto
3.1 The first female-oriented web3 application, a gift for female users and professionals in web3
3.2 Emotional assets + decentralization
3.3 What can HIM bring to Web3?
4. Conclusion
The article uses the first female-oriented web3 game HIM as an example to explore the application of AI + Crypto in web3 games. HIM combines AI and Crypto to provide players with rich interactive experiences, high-quality gameplay, and artistic content.
HIM adopts an economic model with fiat net inflows as its core and is committed to avoiding the Ponzi dilemma through high-quality content and excellent gameplay. It also incorporates the Love and earn gameplay, allowing players to earn income by selling NFTs.
HIM uses a large language model to generate natural and distinguishable dialogue content based on game scenarios and character traits, enhancing the authenticity of virtual characters and the immersion of players. In addition, the HIM team has developed a training method for virtual humans’ AI to provide a more realistic gaming experience.
The HIM team focuses on creating fully-dimensional virtual images, making virtual humans an important part of players’ lives. HIM also emphasizes the social attributes of virtual humans, hoping that everyone will have their own virtual partners in the future, and these partners will exist in social networks like real people, connecting everyone.
The goal of HIM is to create a virtual human universe through AI boyfriends, AI girlfriends, and AI pets, providing people with power and companionship.
In the midst of contemplating how to deploy large-scale models trustlessly and transparently on the chain, how on-chain AI can bring value to web3, and how the proof system can support the trillion-parameter LLM (refer to the previous article), we have also begun to think about a series of questions. The train of thought is roughly as follows:
First, is it currently worthwhile to achieve trustless and transparent AI through encryption technology?
Is it really worth the effort for a startup to research how to integrate on-chain LLM to bring enough value-add?
Which projects are worth investing significant resources in to delve deeper into on-chain AI?
Is on-chain AI the only good combination of AI and crypto?
It is certain that on-chain AI is a field full of imagination and worth further exploration. 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 trustless LLM support to achieve their own breakthrough in value.
Looking at it from another perspective, not all AI models need to be deployed on-chain to be trustless, just like most people don’t care about how chatgpt deduces and gives results to queries or the stable diffusion used, whether it is a certain version of the model architecture or specific parameter settings.
In most scenarios, most users care about 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? In addition to developing trustless LLM from infrastructure to algorithms, another opposite direction is to downplay the impact of the black box in the reasoning process and find suitable scenarios to apply the powerful reasoning capabilities of large models.
Web3 game HIM is one of the few projects that clearly understands the combination of AI + Crypto and has the ability to implement it at the application level.
This article mainly discusses the ambitions of the Web3 game HIM from the perspective of AI application and implementation.
First, let’s introduce the main character (HIM ranks first in the Binance MVB VI application category):
HIM is a female-oriented 2D virtual boyfriend game.
The theme of the game is: there are times when people feel lonely and need encouragement, companionship, and love; real-life love also has its limitations and regrets. HIM hopes to provide users with an AI virtual boyfriend who understands them the most and will always accompany them, and a love experience that is free, happy, and exclusive to the user. Players will initially receive a virtual boyfriend stored on the chain in the form of SBT, and subsequent NFTs such as clothing, accessories, and rooms will be combined with this SBT. In addition, the SBT constitutes the non-fungible game character for player development, storing basic information, nine-dimensional personality traits, nine-dimensional relationship attributes of the male lead, as well as important memories, conversations, and emotional records with the virtual boyfriend.
The game mainly focuses on idle cultivation of virtual boyfriends and showoff of in-game social interactions. There will also be periodic airdrops in the game, allowing players with higher values that match the boyfriend more to have a greater chance of obtaining limited edition NFTs. The gameplay includes card drawing, dressing up, dialogue, collection, adventure battles, cooking, traveling, and NFT trading. I took a look at their game demo, and each gameplay has rich player interaction.
HIM is a free-to-play game that uses an economic model with fiat net inflows at its core. It also incorporates some Love and earn gameplay, allowing players to earn income by selling NFTs. However, the core of the game still relies on the belief in gameplay and the quality of artistic content to attract players to pay for gameplay and content.
Web3 games are indeed one of the scenes where AI is more suitable, which also aligns with the development process of AI:
The game scene provides a natural and rich interactive environment for AI to interact with players through dialogue or other means. This environment helps large models leverage their advantages in natural language processing, providing a richer and 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 receive timely feedback to continuously optimize their decision-making abilities. The frequent feedback in the game is also more conducive for developers to test and fine-tune the performance of large models.
The scenes in the game are controllable, and the requirements for determinism and seriousness are more flexible compared to real-world application scenarios. Therefore, the deployment and testing of large models in games face less resistance and are easier to promote, reducing the difficulty and risk of technical implementation from another perspective.
Two years ago, people were still thinking about how to use AI as a tool more effectively until chatgpt emerged and disrupted the production relationship, and people realized the dimensional impact that LLM can bring. The same applies to Web3 games:
More realistic game character personalities,
Dynamic plot generation,
Visual/artistic design,
Speech generation,
Social interaction,
Gameplay and enjoyment of numerical development
In conclusion, HIM makes virtual humans have more realistic personalities through large language models.
Creating a virtual human is not easy. A truly valuable virtual human is not just a chat box with a conversational AI but needs to be approached from multiple dimensions to make the avatar more complete. HIM’s vision is to make virtual humans a very important part of everyone’s life, greatly enrich personal life and connect 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, with these comprehensive characteristics being the current technological difficulty and risk.
ALL IN ALL, HIM uses large language models to give virtual humans more realistic personalities.
Virtual humans are complex concepts, involving multiple factors such as emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. To give AI boyfriends a sufficient sense of realism, the HIM development team has established a set of somewhat self-consistent numerical systems to quantify the cultivation process and relationship development between players and AI boyfriends. This numerical system can be summarized as a matrix-like numerical model, with vertical representing 9 bidirectional personality attributes and horizontal representing the 9 relationship attributes between AI boyfriends and players. These attributes reflect and influence each other in a many-to-many relationship.
During LLM training, each character will have a standard “character setting” baseline and boundaries for fluctuating personalities. During the game, the values of these attributes will change as a result of player behavior, thereby affecting the game feedback of AI boyfriends (such as idle output, Gacha efficiency, depth of conversation, etc.).
Overall, HIM uses a large language model to make virtual humans have more realistic personalities.
(Note: The article includes several 
tags, which indicate the presence of images in the original text.)The Core Pursuit of the HIM Team:
Exquisite virtual images: Although the main focus of large models is on natural language processing, when combined with other technologies such as GANs, it can provide assistance to game art creation and generate more diverse elements based on the design standards of the HIM art development team, thereby providing users with a richer visual experience.
Based on our understanding, the HIM team has a first-class art team in the gaming industry, while also insisting on high-cost art investment and industrialized, modular art mass production.
High-quality voice acting: The combination of games and AI can generate natural and emotional voice acting through voice synthesis. At the same time, unique personalities can be given to voice acting based on the numerical values of virtual characters.
HIM has a complete voice acting pipeline, including voice acting scripts, voice acting directors, voice recording, post-production mixing, and AI learning and training. By using high-quality human-defined standards and AI collaboration for mass production, high-quality voice acting content that ensures both quality and quantity within the game can be achieved.
Development and long-term bonds with virtual characters: Detailed character backgrounds and personality traits need to be designed to generate interest and resonance with players. At the same time, the growth and development goals of the characters are also essential elements for players to invest time and energy in nurturing virtual characters.
HIM provides rich interactive scenarios and gameplay, allowing players to establish close emotional connections with virtual characters. This relationship will gradually deepen through interaction and nurturing, forming long-term emotional bonds.
Assistance to reality: Virtual characters can provide psychological support that may exceed our expectations. They can provide emotional support and listening to players, allowing players to feel cared for and understood, thereby alleviating troubles in real life. In addition, virtual characters can be well integrated into interactions related to life skills, habit formation, personalized recommendations, language learning, goal management, and even real-world devices or services.
AI Boyfriend alarm clock, sleep aid, menstrual cycle tracking, learning companionship, food recommendations, and diary reminders are all examples of assistance and support that HIM hopes to provide to users in real life through long-term version iterations.
Rich experiences in clothing, food, housing, and transportation in the virtual world: In the story told by HIM, each AI Boyfriend is left alone in a lonely parallel universe: in that world, there is only him, and the contact with the outside world through the phone is all he has. Explore the scenery in his world with your virtual boyfriend, and try to see if there is a chance to meet him in his world or your world.
Social attributes as relationship nodes: The HIM team believes that with the development of AI, in the near future, everyone will have their own exclusive virtual companions, and these virtual companions will be more like real “people”, existing in the entire social network, connecting everyone together.
Each person’s virtual companion may become an important hub connecting people closely in the rapidly developing AI field.
The above-mentioned artistic aesthetic and mass production solutions are essential for a Web3 game. It is important to attract players to spend time in the virtual world, and one crucial point is that the virtual characters in the game have a higher aesthetic level than the real world.
HIM is likely to be the first female-oriented web3 application, and female users and professionals in web3 may receive a gift specially prepared for them for the first time.
At the same time, in the traditional Web2 world, female-oriented games have always been considered a large and potential market.
We asked the HIM project what they hope users can experience, and they wrote the following:
Sometimes in the morning, when facing another seemingly repetitive day, receiving a “Good morning” from “him”;
Sometimes late at night, when facing heavy overtime work, seeing “him” silently accompanying you on your phone;
Sometimes lonely companionship, sometimes encouraging support, cheering from “him” after success, and “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;
“It” seems to always be there. Maybe at certain moments, you may forget about “him” because of busyness, but “he” is always willing to accompany you.
With the increasing popularity of mobile games among female users worldwide, large Web2 game companies with millions of daily active users are continuously emerging in the female-oriented game products market.
After the formation of social communities centered on female users, there is great potential for expansion. Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) is a social media platform that started with female users and expanded to a broader user base, which strongly proves this point. This game category, which targets half of the global population, can bring surprises through the support of AI and crypto, and we look forward to it.
In the words of Ben, the founder of HIM: “AI virtual humans make digital assets truly appear in our lives in the form of ‘people’ for the first time. They may be your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your close friend, or any important companion in your life. Therefore, they should not be able to disappear with a switch like all digital assets stored in centralized servers before. Their existence should be determined by you at least, not by a company.”
Important emotional and asset aspects in the virtual world should be owned by users, not defined and controlled by centralized servers:
Emotional assets not only include personal information and privacy data but also represent players’ emotional investment and memories. Decentralized networks can protect these emotional values, ensure data ownership belongs to users, and allow users to autonomously decide how to use, share, and protect their data. This decentralized data ownership model avoids the control of players’ emotional assets by third parties or centralized institutions. At the same time, the community autonomy provided by Web3 allows players to participate in the creation and dissemination of emotional assets, further enhancing their emotional value.
Various experiences in emotional relationships should also be permanently stored:
From an emotional investment perspective, players inject a large amount of emotion into the game and form deep bonds with virtual characters. The efforts made to achieve game goals are unique and precious. These emotional experiences should be permanently stored. Therefore, to some extent, they should have the power of eternal existence. At the same time, the relationship between players and virtual characters, such as friendship, love, anger, and dissatisfaction, can also be recorded and stored permanently through blockchain technology.
As an emotional bond in the HIM game, virtual characters are not just for entertainment but also have asset attributes and high economic value. Users will invest time and money in purchasing and decorating virtual characters in the game. Recording these assets on the blockchain can ensure that their value truly returns to the users and provides a transparent and secure trading environment.
Decentralized networks bring highly valuable value-additions to HIM, but it is also evident that HIM brings value to web3:
A large number of fresh users:
From the perspective of emotional needs, the companionship of virtual characters satisfies users’ emotional needs. These needs may be difficult to meet in real life, and HIM provides a safe and free environment for users to interact with virtual characters. This emotional appeal can attract a large number of users to Web3.
HIM is a web3 game with a two-dimensional attribute. Both the two-dimensional culture and AI virtual characters have strong community attributes and social potential. At the same time, as one of the most popular subcultures among young people globally, the two-dimensional mobile game Genshin Impact is also one of the top mobile games worldwide. The potential audience for potential female-oriented users, two-dimensional users, and AI virtual character social interaction is the fresh blood that HIM may bring to Web3.
Ultimate considerations for economic models:
Different from traditional x2earn games, HIM combines Web3 and token utility, adding Web3 tools to an excellent web2 game, finding a very suitable point of integration, thereby achieving the effect of 1 + 1 > 2. For HIM, creating an excellent game with verified success in terms of content and gameplay is the foundation of everything. Crypto is a tool attribute rather than solely relying on survival through Web3. Avoiding the Ponzi dilemma is an important 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 model. On the one hand, it adopts the typical Web2 game economic model, where players can choose to pay for in-game items or services. This approach can attract a large number of users and generate revenue through in-app purchases. At the same time, HIM has upgraded the Web3 X to earn model. In this model, players can earn income by selling NFTs, allowing players to receive tangible returns for the time and effort invested in the game. HIM’s economic system actively balances player payments and earnings.
It is worth noting that HIM hopes to encourage players to pay for game experience and content by providing high-quality gameplay and artistic content. From this perspective, HIM does not rely solely on the possibility of player earnings to attract and retain players. Instead, it aims to create a more balanced and sustainable economic model that considers both player earnings and the quality of gameplay and content. This is a more comprehensive and complex model that has the potential to provide new ideas for the economic model design of Web3 games.
The ultimate goal of HIM is to create a second-dimensional virtual human universe that can empower and accompany many people. In addition to the flagship product HIM, the game AI Girlfriend HER is also being developed simultaneously. They also hope to use excellent AI virtual human products to provide each user with an exclusive and everlasting virtual companion who understands them the most. Meanwhile, every bit of emotional story will be recorded.
The HIM team believes that in the near future, everyone will have their own AI virtual companions. Whether this will become a universe they are unaware of is not important. Because if you are sad or lonely, having a word of encouragement from this virtual friend on your phone, even if it is just a little, isn’t it cool?