6 ms·

Maybe there can be a new golden age of interactive fiction using modern NLP and other AI related technologies?

jordanpg 8y ago
I enjoy thinking about the future of IF. I see it as a gaming/storytelling medium with a simultaneously huge potential but still vast chasms to cross before it gets there. NLP etc. has great potential to improve the parsing capabilities, to be sure, but it's not obvious to me that that will dramatically improve the experience. Is `pick up the shiny brass thing` really better than `GET LAMP`? IMO, it might make IF more accessible to non-techy, non-text parser gamers, but that's about it. I think the next leap for IF games will involve non-linear stories that are better suited to the medium. The success of games like "Papers, Please" in particular has sparked my imagination in this area.
- willvarfar 8y ago
  I recall a Ludum Dare entrant which was an android app that pretended to be a walkie-talkie to control some security operatives you were telling to search a building to investigate some noises. Very spooky. And a very good use of some basic voice parsing and NLP.
  - reificator 8y ago
    Link please? That is an incredibly ambitious concept for a game jam, but it sounds like they pulled it off?
    - klodolph 8y ago
      Game jams are literally the best time to try risky concepts. If it fails, you’ve spent only a small amount of time, and there’s a good chance that people will play your game and give you feedback. I can’t think of a better time to take a risk. (Note: Parent comment edited risky -> ambitious.)
      - reificator 8y ago
        I didn't mean it was a risk in any negative sense. I was just looking for the word "ambitious" and couldn't find it in my sleep deprived state... Seriously, I'm so tired I looked up "ballsy thesaurus" and clicked related words for probably five minutes before I gave up looking and just typed 'risky' hoping it'd be good enough.
    - willvarfar 8y ago
      Googling found it http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8342 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid... The gameplay video is awesome. But perhaps not so much NLP... this was 2012! Was it really that long ago? And my memory was fuzzy. But just imagine what could be possible!
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  Inform 7 lets you write games in a language that reads like English even if it doesn't write like English.
- alchemism 8y ago
  The most memorable IF I’ve played through was one[1] in which you were a captured spy being interrogated in semi-linear fashion. The game was a retelling of your capture, where every wrong choice amounted to ‘It could not have happened that way, go back and tell me what you really did.’ The only way to win was to slip one lie into the retelling, and then when the game catches up to the present moment... [1]Spider and Web
  - gjm11 8y ago
    Written by Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin, the person whose blog post about ZIL this is all a discussion of.
- Zanni 8y ago
  Struggling with the limitations of the parser was one of the recurring frustrations with Infocom games. "GET LAMP" is fine, but anything more complex quickly becomes challenging. I remember getting stuck in "The Lurking Horror" because I couldn't figure out how to climb down off a ledge, despite having a ladder. Use ladder? Climb ladder? Climb down? Climb down with ladder? Climb ledge with ladder?
  - Drdrdrq 8y ago
    So... What was it? :)
msla 8y ago
The problem to solve is game length and replayability. If you don't make moon logic puzzles, your puzzles can be solved relatively quickly unless you're very, very good at making fair puzzles which are also legitimately difficult. Therefore, you're going to need more puzzles than an FPS or action game which incidentally has some puzzles in order to achieve the same total game length, and making content like that is legitimately hard. Similarly, in order to make your games playable more than once, you need branching paths, such that you have different routes for the players to go down each time, and I really shouldn't need to explain the concept of "combinatorial explosion" in this forum. Add to that the expense of things like art assents and voice acting (unless you really think text adventures are going to come back in a big way) and it becomes prohibitively expensive to not railroad everyone down one main plot with, at most, a few minor side-treks which quickly rejoin the main line.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  I want a procedurally generated version of Danganronpa.
- zantana 8y ago
  I do think there is a Sturgeon's Law problem where it's hard enough to come up with linear stories which are compelling. Based on some of the experimentalism in modern day game development in places like ichi.io hopefully they can come with some compelling genres I'm not going to go down some half finished path in Bandersnatch when Black Mirror has enough problem with single stories.
- jordanpg 8y ago
  This is why I think the "Papers, Please" paradigm is so interesting. The overall storyline is replaced with a repetitive but novel task with increasing difficultly, and various other loosely coupled storylines are grafted onto the task in different ways. The task also replaces the explicit puzzles. It is as though rather than being told the story, you are viewing vignettes of the story through a very narrow window
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  The reason why IF Games are so focused on puzzles is that they essential can't do anything else. Even dialogs are either about solving a puzzle or choosing a branch in the story. The point about AI in IF would be to break that mold. Dialogs can be more challenging, for example you could make a game about interrogating people. Or you could tell NPCs to do certain stuff for you. Or these NPCs could have some advanced planning or decision making. To make IF more interesting, especially for those outside a very narrow niche, you would need them to be a lot easier to navigate, and offer more challenges that don't look like puzzles and don't hit you with a brain-twister at every turn.
sehugg 8y ago
Versu was one such attempt, with an engine designed by the Sims 3 AI developer: https://versu.com/about/ https://versu.com/about/ Though I'd guess that's more of a sophisticated GOFAI than RNNs.
blacksmith_tb 8y ago
Seems like smart speakers are a good fit, my eight year old spent a little while playing with an IF Alexa skill not long ago. Of course, backtracking leads to a lot of agonizing repetition, which isn't really different than seeing it in text, but at least there you can skim over descriptions you've already seen.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  This is why "verbose/brief/superbrief" became a thing in IF. Verbose: Always show the full description of a room when you enter it. Brief: Show a short description when you re-enter a room. Superbrief: Always show the short description. (Regardless of which you chose, you could always 'look' to get a full description.)
imglorp 8y ago
I love this idea, but encourage people not to get hung up on the UI--ie how you interact with the game world--and instead think about what's going on in the game world. What if the world included a number of fully independent agents with their own motivations, values, and policies and equipped with pattern matching, goal solving, optimization, and even a hint of common sense[1]. The game state would never be the same twice, and it would depend on how you interacted with the agents and they with each other. TlDr: If you open a door, you might let the Grue out of its maze. [1] https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  I would suggest dialogs as the main focus for AI. I don't believe "complex and dynamic" NPCs would work well enough to make a fun game.
- egypturnash 8y ago
  I suspect that making it not feel like you're pushing buttons to get the same lines of dialogue out of wandering bots is going to require solving some pretty hard AI problems. You could probably make it work now with, say, a game world full of broken robots or something.
gmueckl 8y ago
Well, I would like to think that the ties of interactive fiction to text as the mode of interaction are likely the first to be broken. Both speech recognition and speech synthesis have progressed by leaps and bounds. Computer graphics have progressed to a point where human characters can be made expressive and nuanced. Imagine an engine that that takes games scripted as interactive fiction, procedurally generates the game world from the prose (far fetched, but first steps exist as research papers), populates it with the characters from the text and makes them act out the written dialog while honoring the implicit stage directions given in the written form ("he whispers in your ear" etc...). All of that presented in VR, which would make having a dialog with these virtual characters more natural. Looking at the tech that exists today, I believe that we are about halfway there.

I enjoy thinking about the future of IF. I see it as a gaming/storytelling medium with a simultaneously huge potential but still vast chasms to cross before it gets there. NLP etc. has great potential to improve the parsing capabilities, to be sure, but it's not obvious to me that that will dramatically improve the experience. Is `pick up the shiny brass thing` really better than `GET LAMP`? IMO, it might make IF more accessible to non-techy, non-text parser gamers, but that's about it. I think the next leap for IF games will involve non-linear stories that are better suited to the medium. The success of games like "Papers, Please" in particular has sparked my imagination in this area.

willvarfar 8y ago
I recall a Ludum Dare entrant which was an android app that pretended to be a walkie-talkie to control some security operatives you were telling to search a building to investigate some noises. Very spooky. And a very good use of some basic voice parsing and NLP.
- reificator 8y ago
  Link please? That is an incredibly ambitious concept for a game jam, but it sounds like they pulled it off?
  - klodolph 8y ago
    Game jams are literally the best time to try risky concepts. If it fails, you’ve spent only a small amount of time, and there’s a good chance that people will play your game and give you feedback. I can’t think of a better time to take a risk. (Note: Parent comment edited risky -> ambitious.)
    - reificator 8y ago
      I didn't mean it was a risk in any negative sense. I was just looking for the word "ambitious" and couldn't find it in my sleep deprived state... Seriously, I'm so tired I looked up "ballsy thesaurus" and clicked related words for probably five minutes before I gave up looking and just typed 'risky' hoping it'd be good enough.
  - willvarfar 8y ago
    Googling found it http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=8342 http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid... The gameplay video is awesome. But perhaps not so much NLP... this was 2012! Was it really that long ago? And my memory was fuzzy. But just imagine what could be possible!
PaulHoule 8y ago
Inform 7 lets you write games in a language that reads like English even if it doesn't write like English.
alchemism 8y ago
The most memorable IF I’ve played through was one[1] in which you were a captured spy being interrogated in semi-linear fashion. The game was a retelling of your capture, where every wrong choice amounted to ‘It could not have happened that way, go back and tell me what you really did.’ The only way to win was to slip one lie into the retelling, and then when the game catches up to the present moment... [1]Spider and Web
- gjm11 8y ago
  Written by Andrew "Zarf" Plotkin, the person whose blog post about ZIL this is all a discussion of.
Zanni 8y ago
Struggling with the limitations of the parser was one of the recurring frustrations with Infocom games. "GET LAMP" is fine, but anything more complex quickly becomes challenging. I remember getting stuck in "The Lurking Horror" because I couldn't figure out how to climb down off a ledge, despite having a ladder. Use ladder? Climb ladder? Climb down? Climb down with ladder? Climb ledge with ladder?
- Drdrdrq 8y ago
  So... What was it? :)

msla 8y ago

The problem to solve is game length and replayability. If you don't make moon logic puzzles, your puzzles can be solved relatively quickly unless you're very, very good at making fair puzzles which are also legitimately difficult. Therefore, you're going to need more puzzles than an FPS or action game which incidentally has some puzzles in order to achieve the same total game length, and making content like that is legitimately hard. Similarly, in order to make your games playable more than once, you need branching paths, such that you have different routes for the players to go down each time, and I really shouldn't need to explain the concept of "combinatorial explosion" in this forum. Add to that the expense of things like art assents and voice acting (unless you really think text adventures are going to come back in a big way) and it becomes prohibitively expensive to not railroad everyone down one main plot with, at most, a few minor side-treks which quickly rejoin the main line.

PaulHoule 8y ago
I want a procedurally generated version of Danganronpa.
zantana 8y ago
I do think there is a Sturgeon's Law problem where it's hard enough to come up with linear stories which are compelling. Based on some of the experimentalism in modern day game development in places like ichi.io hopefully they can come with some compelling genres I'm not going to go down some half finished path in Bandersnatch when Black Mirror has enough problem with single stories.
jordanpg 8y ago
This is why I think the "Papers, Please" paradigm is so interesting. The overall storyline is replaced with a repetitive but novel task with increasing difficultly, and various other loosely coupled storylines are grafted onto the task in different ways. The task also replaces the explicit puzzles. It is as though rather than being told the story, you are viewing vignettes of the story through a very narrow window
bayesian_horse 8y ago
The reason why IF Games are so focused on puzzles is that they essential can't do anything else. Even dialogs are either about solving a puzzle or choosing a branch in the story. The point about AI in IF would be to break that mold. Dialogs can be more challenging, for example you could make a game about interrogating people. Or you could tell NPCs to do certain stuff for you. Or these NPCs could have some advanced planning or decision making. To make IF more interesting, especially for those outside a very narrow niche, you would need them to be a lot easier to navigate, and offer more challenges that don't look like puzzles and don't hit you with a brain-twister at every turn.

sehugg 8y ago

Versu was one such attempt, with an engine designed by the Sims 3 AI developer: https://versu.com/about/ https://versu.com/about/ Though I'd guess that's more of a sophisticated GOFAI than RNNs.

blacksmith_tb 8y ago

Seems like smart speakers are a good fit, my eight year old spent a little while playing with an IF Alexa skill not long ago. Of course, backtracking leads to a lot of agonizing repetition, which isn't really different than seeing it in text, but at least there you can skim over descriptions you've already seen.

egypturnash 8y ago
This is why "verbose/brief/superbrief" became a thing in IF. Verbose: Always show the full description of a room when you enter it. Brief: Show a short description when you re-enter a room. Superbrief: Always show the short description. (Regardless of which you chose, you could always 'look' to get a full description.)

imglorp 8y ago

I love this idea, but encourage people not to get hung up on the UI--ie how you interact with the game world--and instead think about what's going on in the game world. What if the world included a number of fully independent agents with their own motivations, values, and policies and equipped with pattern matching, goal solving, optimization, and even a hint of common sense[1]. The game state would never be the same twice, and it would depend on how you interacted with the agents and they with each other. TlDr: If you open a door, you might let the Grue out of its maze. [1] https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc https://github.com/AndrewSmart/opencyc

bayesian_horse 8y ago
I would suggest dialogs as the main focus for AI. I don't believe "complex and dynamic" NPCs would work well enough to make a fun game.
egypturnash 8y ago
I suspect that making it not feel like you're pushing buttons to get the same lines of dialogue out of wandering bots is going to require solving some pretty hard AI problems. You could probably make it work now with, say, a game world full of broken robots or something.

gmueckl 8y ago

Well, I would like to think that the ties of interactive fiction to text as the mode of interaction are likely the first to be broken. Both speech recognition and speech synthesis have progressed by leaps and bounds. Computer graphics have progressed to a point where human characters can be made expressive and nuanced. Imagine an engine that that takes games scripted as interactive fiction, procedurally generates the game world from the prose (far fetched, but first steps exist as research papers), populates it with the characters from the text and makes them act out the written dialog while honoring the implicit stage directions given in the written form ("he whispers in your ear" etc...). All of that presented in VR, which would make having a dialog with these virtual characters more natural. Looking at the tech that exists today, I believe that we are about halfway there.