Gaming's Most Divisive Life Sim Is Surprisingly All About Ancient Greek Philosophy
There’s more than just bugs and misbehaving characters in Inzoi’s AI.
On the home screen of South Korea’s rival to The Sims, Inzoi, in the background beside a cute cat, you can see a book on Stoicism. This backdrop is never really explained further in the game and for anyone paying attention, it’s kind of bizarre. After all, Inzoi is a game that is all about creating fashionable characters, buying a house and a car, and generally recreating life. Or is it?
“I’m personally a big fan of Stoicism,” Inzoi’s producer and director, Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim, tells Inverse. “When creating Inzoi, I looked to Stoicism for guidance on what message I wanted to convey through the game.”
Broadly speaking, Stoicism is a practical philosophy that pushes its followers to focus on the things that we can control — namely, the mind — and in doing so to gain emotional resilience against natural current events and other things outside of your control. Kjun says he originally stumbled across Stoicism as a college student trying to simultaneously run his own company while taking classes to get a degree. This idea of zooming out on life and gaining some perspective worked for him in university and “was a good fit for Inzoi,” too.
“Observing someone’s life and death from a third-person perspective in a simulation game can help us accept and enjoy real life with more ease,” Kjun says. “That’s the kind of message we wanted to include in the game.”
Inzoi first attracted attention for its elaborate K-pop idol-like beauty options for character, then for generative AI capabilities, then as a technical display of Nvidia’s latest chips. But for its espousal of Stoicism? Not so much.
It’s been two months since Inzoi was released in Early Access, from Krafton, the same publisher of one of the most popular shooters, PUBG. Inspired by The Sims, Inzoi offers everything you'd expect from a life sim plus a novel Karma system and career options that showcase its South Korean origins. You can enroll your character into a K-pop training school early on in their childhood or order Korean treats by smartphone in game.
The game first attracted attention for its elaborate character customization page and tons of K-pop idol-like beauty options, and then for its generative AI capabilities, becoming a technical display of Nvidia’s latest chips. Now that the superficial hype has calmed down, the focus can shift to the many quirks of Inzoi’s design, from the finer point of building a game that runs on the often bug-ridden and headache-inducing generative AI to its developer’s philosophical point of view.
The AI Hype And The Buggy Reality
Inzoi is one of the very few games publicly and explicitly using generative AI — a sort of model, test bed, and proof of concept all at once.
Among this year’s games, Inzoi is one of the early adopters of generative AI. By turning on AI in the game, you can write an inner thought for the character, which it then interprets using a language model to guide it on what to think and do. For instance, in one run, all the inner thoughts for the characters were written to be characters from the anime Naruto, so one character brooded and sought revenge while another was boy-obsessed. In my game, I wrote characters that were career-driven and family-focused, so my Zois started saying weird things like, “I must dominate the family.”
Kjun says generative AI is there to make it easier for players to add external content to the game.
“One of the reasons I decided to use generative AI was the challenges I experienced as a long-time modder,” Kjun says. “Bringing external resources into a game would often cause crashes or glitches, reducing overall stability.”
Leaning on gen AI means more ways to customize and mod the game for players. On top of the Smart Zoi inner thoughts feature, Inzoi also lets players upload their own clothes and use AI to generate clothing textures and more. Its use of AI has been both lambasted and praised by gamers, some who are wary of AI stealing work from artists without credit and others who are ambivalent.
“We were very impressed with how AI could behave like humans, which led to the start of developing Smart Zois,” Kjun says, “We hoped that applying such AI technology to Inzoi would make the gameplay experience much more interesting.”
In my game, I wrote characters that were career-driven and family-focused, so my Zois started saying weird things like, “I must dominate the family.”
Not Exactly Karma
There are more explicit nods to Stoicism in Inzoi. The Karma system, for one. In it, the game tracks each character’s karma score, measuring if they have been kind to others in society, or amoral, committing crimes like running pedestrians over, acts of fraud online, or petty theft. The sum of their actions is tracked by their score, and when a character dies, if their karma score is too low, they become a ghost. Too many ghosts in the town, and no new characters can be born.
This, says Kjun, is “deeply connected to Stoicism.” He brings up a Charlie Chaplin quote here: “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” As such, the Karma system was designed to not label any action as inherently good or evil, but as a meaningful part of life. It’s not a connection that many would immediately understand from the jump, and Kjun admits this feature still needs to worked on to be made clearer.
The game tracks each character’s karma score, measuring if they have been kind to others in society, or amoral, committing crimes like running pedestrians over, acts of fraud online, or petty theft.
“Modern society is highly driven by results,” he explains. “Even in game development, there is a lot of pressure to succeed,” Kjun says. But Inzoi is designed so that players feel joy even in taking small actions and the overall result isn’t the point, he says. “We wanted to convey the message that life is full of ups and downs, and as told by the Eastern proverb “sae-ong-ji-ma” (life is full of unforeseeable twists), a single outcome can’t define an entire life.”
For now, the bigger picture of Inzoi — and what the Karma system means — hasn’t really been picked up by a lot of players. Many of them instead wrinkle their noses at the broad use of generative AI rather than the consequence and commentary of its use in this game. Such a tepid response is not exactly surprising. AI companies are currently being sued for copyright infringement by many creators, and generative AI trained on large datasets still have a tendency to generate works that resemble their sources. Kjun says that even though Inzoi’s AI model was only trained on in-house data, it’s still a challenge to prevent “off-theme results.” Another challenge was optimizing the game so that the AI didn’t drain resources from regular gameplay.
Inzoi’s Producer and Director, Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim.
The Illusion Of Freedom
Within Inzoi, there’s currently a bug where characters will ignore their work schedules once generative AI is turned on. My characters, who were journalists and budding professors, quickly became unemployed, stay-at-home gamers. Since I noted it back in March, the issue still hasn’t been patched, Kjun says.
“We’re still working on that bug,” he says, adding that changes are coming this year. “We’re aiming for their internal thoughts to naturally drive their interactions. We’re also working on making them more aware of what is happening around them, so that they can react accordingly.”
There may be a bigger lesson here.
What would the Stoics have to say about a game that is a simulation of life, controlled by a computer that takes your inputs and adds a simulacrum of sentience? Zeno of Citium, the so-called father of Stoicism, might have found a fitting reflection of his own philosophy here.
Zeno believed that destiny loomed large in our lives and that avoiding deception and acknowledging where nature has led us is a prime virtue. In a telling allegory, he talked about a dog tied to a cart. If the dog follows the cart, it is actually being both pulled and following, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. If the dog does not follow the cart, it will soon be compelled to by a tug on its leash. This, Zeno believed, is the case with all humans. Even if we don't want to, we will be compelled to follow what is destined.
The idea of fate has been toyed with in many, many games, from RPGs to open world games. After all, you are so often exploring a designed world with rules and outcomes that are entirely predestined, written by developers. In Sims, however, there’s more chaos. Players either conform and find fun in trends or do what they want and add to the sense of spontaneity that Sims are so known for. But when you add in generative AI, it’s like tying yourself to the cart. When you’re pushing the cart, so to speak, you may not notice that tie. But there are moments when the AI seems at odds with your decisions — and you get pulled anyway. Sounds a lot like the moment we’re in, doesn’t it?
