Game Developers Push Limits Of Linguistic Interactivity
Gaming engineers are tinkering with a new technology known as “Chatbot” in an effort to tackle one of “the last uncracked problems” in video-game design: How to let gamers verbally communicate with their in-game characters.
The new Sherlock Holmes video game “221b” will attempt to utilize the new software to allow players to verbally interrogate witnesses in the game, where victory is incumbent on cajoling the right answers out of suspicious digital characters.
“It’s our role to predict what you might know at that point in the game and the questions you might ask,” explained Rollo Carpenter of the digital developing company Existor to BBC News.
“The ways that you might say things to them are almost unlimited.”
Carpenter is an award-winning program designer who specializes in creating software that mimics real-life human conversation.
Instead of traditional approaches to digital interactivity which involve the game making lists of possible questions and answers, his technology allows game characters to make a “fuzzy interpretation” of what the player says to them in order to come up with an appropriate answer.
A system of pattern matching is then used to select the most relevant response to a player’s input.
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Though the technology is no doubt a big step forward for the gaming industry, it still has a number of shortcomings. For example, a game may be able decipher a multitude of different player inputs, but the number of responses that it can offer in return are still rather meager.
Another expert in gaming technology, Dr. Mike Reddy of the University of Wales, has long been interested in the use of human language with artificial intelligence.
Dr. Reddy, who teaches game development and artificial intelligence, points to a novel technique used by creators of the Nintendo DS game “Scribblenauts.”
“In this game, the player evokes objects and characters by typing or writing their name,” he told BBC News.
The player can simply type in a word like “tractor” or “airplane” to cue the game to send out the object of choice. Things get interesting when the various objects have to be linked together to solve problems.
“The clever semantic implementation is to know what would happen when a Dog meets a Lion," said Reddy.
“The game has 22,000 plus words and has attempted to implement all the possible interactions. Put Death up against God, for example, and you get an interesting surprise.”
For video games that are destined to be big-selling blockbusters, one of the biggest challenges for developers lies in creating spontaneous hi-quality voice acting and animations””that is, for situations that arise in the game from a player’s unique combination of choices that were not explicitly planned for by its designers.
Though a number of games have begun tackling this problem, creating authentic language-based interactions with digital characters is one of the last great frontiers for the gaming industry, said Reddy.
“We have come a long way from “˜All your base are belong to us’ and “˜TAKE AXE. THROW AXE AT DWARF,’” he joked.
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