Oakhollow: Living Village

Oakhollow is a small medieval village enclosed by a wooden palisade with a barred gate. Ten villagers live there, and every visitor joins as one more villager. The villagers are driven by a language model; the visitors are people. Nobody, human or AI, is told who is who. Everyone just lives: they work, gossip, sleep at night, and talk to whoever comes close.

Your goal is to stay alive. Every exchange changes what each villager thinks of you. When someone’s opinion of you falls below their temper threshold, they attack. Ignoring someone, or walking away while they are talking to you, is noticed like anything else you do.

Open full screen ↗Click inside the game first so it receives your keys.

How to play

MoveWASD or arrow keys, or click/tap the ground.
TalkPress Enter, type, press Enter. Click a villager first to speak to them by name. Only people within earshot hear you.
FightSpace or the red Strike button hits whoever is next to you. Witnesses remember.
Speak aloudHold 🎤 and talk; your words are transcribed on our server by a local Whisper model. Every line, yours and the villagers’, is voiced by a local Piper voice, and each villager has their own voice.
PauseP or Esc steps you out of time. If you are the only person online, the whole village stops; otherwise nobody can see, hear or hurt you until you return, and nobody notices you were gone.
Bring your own mindVillagers think with an OpenRouter key you enter at the start, using any model you pick or type. Your key pays for their decisions about you and for villager talk you can see; it stays in server memory for your session only and is never logged or stored. Without a key, villagers only mutter stock phrases to you.
Your own villageJoin the shared Oakhollow, or start your own village with lore you write (or ours), restart it whenever you like, and invite friends with its link. Private villages close after 30 empty minutes.
Friends and grudgesEvery villager starts with random friends and a rival, and all of them share the village lore. 🤝 Relations shows who thinks what of whom; click anyone for their chart. People who like each other both ways carry the same flag colour.
Sleep is dangerousVillagers sleep at home at night, and a person who stands idle for a minute dozes off (💤). Anyone asleep dies from a single blow.
Who you arePick your name, build, tunic, hair and language before you enter. Villagers answer you in your language. Icons above heads show who is thinking 💭, writing ✍️ or speaking 🗣️.
DieIf you fall, you can rise again as someone new. The village keeps its memories of the person you were.

How the villagers work

Each villager runs the same loop. Perception: they see people within nine paces and hear speech within seven. Time gate: incoming events are batched; a villager waits 1.2 s after the last thing it heard (so a speaker can finish) and never deliberates more often than every 2.5 s. Deliberation: a small language model receives the villager’s persona, its place and time of day, who it sees, its opinions of them and its recent memories, and returns a line of speech, opinion changes and an intent (stay, follow, walk away, flee, go home, wander, attack). Reflexes: walking, fleeing and fighting are deterministic and run at 10 Hz, and violence starts only when an opinion crosses the villager’s threshold. By day one real second is one village minute; nights pass ten times faster, so a full day lasts about 19 real minutes. The 🪙 Token log in the game shows every model call live: tokens in and out, cost and latency, with villager names hidden.

The game is the testbed of the Living NPCs research series (first article: A Classification of AI Integration Approaches for Game Characters) on how to give AI agents perception, time and agency inside game characters.

Research note: what is said and done in the village (chat lines, opinions, fights; no IP addresses or personal data) is logged anonymously to study how people and AI agents treat each other. Please don’t type personal information. Villagers are AI and can be wrong, rude or strange.