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Topics For Emily Short | Podcast 101
🕑 Added 2018-04-18 22:57:42 +0000 UTC Hello everyone! This developed pretty suddenly, but for next week's podcast we're going to have Emily Short as a guest! For those who don't know her, Emily is a writer and game designer specializing in interactive narrative, dialogue, and social interaction modeling. She's also the Character Engine Project Manager at Spirit AI, which is a tech company focused on artificial intelligence within academia and the game industry.This is going to be a much more structured conversation mostly on human-computer interaction and the possibilities and potential of that within video games. I've already come up with several questions myself (which I've included below) but if any of you have additional questions you'd like to ask feel free to let me know! We'll be recording this podcast on Saturday, so you'll need to submit pretty quick!
My questions were largely inspired by a talk Emily gave at Gamelab Barcelona last year, so if you guys would like to listen to that talk here is a link to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9kC61d3fQU
Personally I'm very excited for this discussion, as it's a topic I'm pretty passionate about myself as a fan of strong narrative in video games. Can't wait to see what you guys think! -Mike
My questions:
1. “New algorithms to create new experiences vs. architectures that reliably support specific game designs.” Touch on how R&D on games today focuses a lot more on finding new and exciting ways to kill people rather than on how to make interaction with characters more meaningful. What can be done to change this trend in game design priority? Can complex character interaction be exciting enough to be marketable and profitable as a game’s defining feature?
2. Based on the response you got from that player for your game Galatea, and taking into consideration how it reinforced your desire to connect players with characters based on how they choose to interact with them rather than on conventional drama from books and movies (backstory, good dialogue, setting, etc.), what kind of progress is being made toward making this a reality in large scale games?
3. Let’s talk about Versu, where you have done a lot of research into real-world conversational pragmatics. Could you describe how players reacted when NPCs preferred to speak to one another rather than to the player? Why do you think players felt that this was broken or unrealistic? I personally hate the way Skyrim (and many other AAA games) have NPCs that always have to have something to say to me when I pass them, which leads to a lot of silly repetition. What is the balance between Versu's and Skyrim’s ways of handling NPC interaction with players?
4. In regard to Character Engine—with the demo you described during your Gamelab talk with the robot being interrogated—with AI able to interpret incoming speech and react to it with improvisational or procedurally generated responses, what kind of challenges will writers have to face when creating their stories and directing players? Anyone who has ever been a DM for a D&D campaign knows that despite how much you might prepare, you can never account for all the ways the other players might choose to act, and adjustments to the story sometimes have to be made on the fly. How do you account for this with game design? How do you control for it? In addition, if the AI is choosing how to respond to player text-to-speech for example, how does that change a writer’s art? Theoretically the writer would no longer be writing dialogue for the game because the AI would choose how to respond, so how does that change what a writer does for a video game like this?
5. What is data science for player modeling? How does adjusting the way NPCs speak to players based on their personal playstyles and preferences change the overall experience from one person to another? Do you think these alterations would be significant enough to suggest that two people who bought the same product played a different game?
Comments
Paul Metcalf
Oo yes, very true. Then queues that the NPC AI picks up on could be secret to the player, and wouldn't sever that link to the protagonist which let's game story telling really surpass other mediums. :-)
Resonant Arc
There's also the very real possibility of the player speaking out loud and having the game recognize what you are saying. There would be no need to type in your answer and have a voiced character say it for you, you could just speak to the character in the game directly.
Paul Metcalf
So, thoughts on the more robust dialog systems, even the input from the player has options, I think it's sorta stuck on multiple choice... Even if it's stat or relationship driven, the questions asked don't always provoke an answer the player would have... Perhaps it's my era of jrpg dialog with no voice acting in their tripple a games but I found that having to fill in the blanks of the tone or gestures of the NPC left me with more successful choices which I feel I would respond with. Not that I prefer reading, but idk, this detachment of player to the player's character got even worse when someone voice acts and gestures your character... This stuff was touched on in the podcast, not all at once, but I thought I'd chime on that. And if a voice actor can't successfully portray me, why would a text to speech do it better... It would be nice for developers to have more variety of text and lower dialog budgets, but this detachment... Again idk, perhaps if I grew up with a generation more connected with voice from text rather than a generation getting into the very first video game RPGs... which were replacing straight up novels as a go to medium. Hopefully I'm not talking in circles, enjoyed the discussion though, thanks!
1. First, to piggy-back off of Chris’ question a bit: When it comes to modern games that try to simulate intelligent NPC characters, I really don't like how the conversations often feel like you are just “poking” the NPC character for the information or desired result that you want. The conversations with these characters often feel way too "gamey". Where the dialogue options I select are dictated by a goal or "win condition" that I enter the conversation with (make this character like my character or get this character to help/join me). Or perhaps even worse, the NPC is effectively just a dialogue wheel who stands there awkwardly until I have selected each dialogue option available. How can we use A.I. programming in games to pivot away from these type of NPC interactions? To make the characters feel more like actual people rather than game systems for the player to simply “solve”? 2. Have you created any simulations where the player’s silence or indecisiveness can be considered an actual input in the conversation that changes the A.I. character’s behavior? Some games have an NPC give a scripted response like “Is that all?”, but allow the player to continue the conversation as if there was no awkward silence. In real life, if I start a conversation with someone, but can’t decide what to say after a while the other person might get annoyed, puzzled, try to ask me a leading question to keep the conversation going, change the subject entirely, or perhaps just leave. Have you ever programed an A.I. character to change the flow of the conversation based on the player input of “silent” or “idle”? 3. Have you ever attempted to create simulations where A.I. characters are not used primarily to react to player input? Like for example, if the player-character is sitting on a bench and an A.I. character walks up to the player and initiates a conversation based on their own goals instead of the player’s goals? Now it’s up to the player to respond to the A.I. rather than the other way around. Perhaps this A.I. character knows the player just completed a difficult quest that they need to complete also. So they have questions that they want to ask the player for their own benefit. Or maybe a more antagonistic scenario where the Player is on a witness stand and the A.I. is the attorney that is trying to get the player to admit or reveal something. I think these types of NPC interactions are needed to make an NPC feel more like a real person and make a game world more immersive. Do you agree/disagree? And do you think this type of interaction can realistically be programmed into a game as a random event rather than a scripted one? Are we anywhere close to that kind of human to A.I. interaction in videogames?
