Games about conversations, about dating, about things less tangible than action, are clearly overwhelming to develop (and also to interpret critically, come to think). But I like when people try. Boy, do I! Over at Gamasutra, we're doing those annual Road to the IGF interviews with the festival's finalists, and today I've done one with the folks behind Prom Week, a game that promises an unprecedentedly sophisticated conversation engine.
The team gives a pretty fascinating interview. Mattie Brice asked me on Twitter about why more people don't try to push social simulation technology (like, why was Facade so long ago, for example, with few comparable examples since?)
I think it's because not only is it an enormous technical challenge, there's also the perception that it's a niche, a thankless academic corner that will never reach beyond an "indie" audience. Good thing some people try, though. (Mattie, is it a coincidence you go by xGalatea online, where Galatea the game is among the most iconic examples of groundbreaking, conversation-oriented interactive fiction in history?)
Anyway, back on task; I also interviewed the creators of musical landscape game Proteus for the Road to the IGF series. Cannot believe it's only a handful of weeks til GDC!
This past weekend was the 2012 Global Game Jam. Good thing I have loads of friends who make video games for me to look at and talk about! As soon as I catch up with what all my favorite people have got done I'll let you know about it.
8 comments:
I remember Facade! Mostly I remember typing the most ridiculous things I could think of to try and break the conversation engine, but it was a really cool experiment (even if the results were a bit underwhelming). Whatever happened to those developers?
regarding the comment about the quirks, you DO realize that mental and social illnesses are just as prevalent and potentially debilitating as any physical illnesses, yes?
Of course -- what I meant is that if that's the case the game's refusal to acknowledge or explore that choice struck me as super weird.
Ahhh. My apologies for misinterpreting what you said.
I tried Galatea yesterday after reading this (been interested in conversation AI for the longest time), and I can't count the times I've replayed it to see what else I can say to steer her in a new, unexpected direction. It brings back memories of old adventure games, testing how NPCs would react to my words.
Conversation AI is a huge undertaking. Oftentimes design eventually reaches a point where you have a pretty good idea of what you want in a game, and you have a good guess about how to solve future problems. Then, as the game is developed, tech limitations will sometimes reshape design as unexpected issues come to light, but they're not always earth-shattering obstacles. There are plenty of good plan Bs for retaining the experience you want to provide.
However, a serious approach towards Conversation AI (i.e. used in a wider, more ambitious scope), any intended design beyond the relative simplicity of Galatea immediately brings to light a number of difficult issues to solve in the design phase, way before any unexpected technical limitations can become apparent through implementation and testing. And in this case plan Bs are more like plan Ds, as they would strip the core of what makes conversational AI so interesting - its near endlessness and unpredictability.
Essentially, it's tackling the goal of creating complex AI that does not manifest itself simply by the NPCs physical actions, as we're accustomed to seeing and playing, but AI that manifests itself through the NPCs dialog. The player wouldn't choose from a limited set of subjects to speak, but could say anything and the AI would be equipped to react to it appropriately, affecting its mood and actions from that point on. Imagine the impact of being able to say almost anything to any NPC in a long action-RPG, regardless of their value to the story, and have each of them react as realistic as possible. But the ability to account for all these possibilities, and make AI complex enough to understand player dialog and be able to react in many different ways, all of which would require extensive resources to create; not to mention the issue of giving the player so much freedom that they could potentially "lose" dozens of hours of play from experimenting towards an irreversible conclusion... no wonder, in the end, Galatea is all text, with the ability to speak with only one NPC, justifying the simple text commands and short story branches.
At any rate, are there any other similar recommendations of games, or demos, like this?
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