In theory, yes, but only if the game is (1) transparent about what it’s transforming your input into and (2) explicit about why it’s failing when it fails. I feel like a broken record about this, but my experience dealing with [i] doesn’t exist’s AI parser was extremely frustrating on this score, with it frequently transforming what I typed into something wildly different from what I was trying to do without giving any insight into why it didn’t understand what I originally typed. (It also failed to understand very basic synonyms, like “take” and “get”, and was in that way a bit of a downgrade from, say, an Inform game by a newbie who didn’t bother implementing any synonyms that didn’t come pre-implemented out of the box, but even if that hadn’t been true this would still be a problem.)
Or if everyone’s tired of me pulling out the same examples all the time, here’s one not from IF: Amazon has recently replaced a bunch of its app functions with an AI chatbot. A couple weeks ago I was trying to look at the price history on an item, which is now something you can only do through the chatbot. I wanted to see if the item was legitimately on sale or if it was one of those things where it’s constantly listed as being on sale to scammily encourage people to buy it. However, no matter what I tried the chatbot would do nothing besides give me the tracking details of a recent order. I had no idea why it was doing that or how to get it to stop doing that. It was frankly a more frustrating experience than I’ve ever had playing guess-the-verb in a parser game.
I think reliability or predictability—if I type X, the game will do Y—is hugely important for a parser game, and that’s explicitly not what LLMs are designed for. Their black-box nature makes knowing what you did wrong and what would be useful to try next really hard.
Also pulling against this is that the kinds of people who make games with LLM parsers generally don’t seem to want transparency. They don’t want the chatbot to ever say it couldn’t match your command with anything it recognized. They want for the player to never have to think about how they’re phrasing what they type because everything will magically Just Work—which is all very well until it doesn’t.
And frankly, given that humans are easily capable of misunderstanding what other humans meant by something, I’m not sure that we will ever be in the position of being able to assume that the AI will understand everything correctly and everything will always Just Work, even if AGI is truly right around the corner as some insist.