“I think that it’s important to create a utilitarian drama world engine instead of worrying about narrative

specific narrative, and around specific people.” True, although to be clear, that’s not what happened in

Façade; the architecture and its languages are general enough that many kinds of interactive dramas could be

created in it, by people other than Michael and me.

I think that’s totally cart-before-the-horse-putting. 3D game engines didn’t start happening until people had developed enough 3d games that they had a pretty good idea of what was and wasn’t needed in them. Toolkits are kits of previously chosen tools; the new ground here has to be, uh, forged, by people who have the ability to make and customize their own tools. (Sorry for the mixed metaphor there.) And I think we have a long way to go before the West is no longer Wild.

Another example–the two biggest modern IF development systems, Inform and Tads, were both written as tools for their authors to make their own IF works first, and only as a tool for others to use later on.

And presumably this is the route Façade has gone. I wouldn’t start saying Façade is general enough for making other things until people actually do so; it’s like saying a priori that the Unreal engine is sufficient for implementing a game like Thief or Deus Ex. (Deus Ex was implemented in Unreal… just barely.)

[LIttlejohn] proposes a drama engine without addressing a market.

Form is not enough, you need something to attach it to, it needs an idiom

Yeah, of course we can all speculate but no one knows yet what this will be. Littlejohn alludes to conventional idioms, movies and sitcoms — “This new art form would immerse the experiencer inside a reality very much like what he or she is already familiar with: film and television,” but he doesn’t expand much further. Obviously lots of ideas will have to get built to figure it out. Once it’s better understood maybe we’ll eventually invent a new term or terms for it. Just like with games, predictably there’ll be all sorts of sub-genres… Besides the idea of the Holodeck, The Diamond Age presents a networked, non-AI-based (if I remember correctly) approach (which now seems all the more feasible, now that MMOGs are up-and-running), but the more recent Literary Devices by Richard Powers offers an equally compelling vision, I thought.

Sean writes:

I think that’s totally cart-before-the-horse-putting.

I wouldn’t start saying Façade is general enough for making other things until people actually do so

True; we should qualify that to say “we imagine / intend” the architecture to be usable by others. :-) (Littlejohn’s article possibly implied that we didn’t have that intent at all.)

O writes:

[Characters] must be able to have simple, believable conversations with users. Achieving this, however, probably means passing the Turing Test

Here’s where careful design will save the day, I think. Yes we’ll need lots more natural language processing and discourse management technology than we currently have, to even achieve simple conversational ability. But characters by no means will need to pass a generic Turing Test; interactive dramas can be pretty context-specific, greatly narrowing the domain of what’s required in conversation. Within that domain, they need to be robust and responsive and as seemingly sentient and intelligent as possible, but that domain (by design) can be believably limited, I think. Based on our experience experimenting with this in Facade, I’m reasonably optimistic that it’s possible (with a bigger team of people) to pull off something believable and satisfying to play…

The proof’s in the pudding with all of this speculation, of course. Randy writes:

You’re actually doing what I can only write about.

I want to say that no, it’s not that hard. To any motivated people out there: read all the must-reads, read up on the various approaches being taken in research labs, think about the problem for a while, and you’ll probably come up with an approach that would make some progress in this area. If you’re not a programmer, team up with someone like-minded. If need be, go to grad school. … Brandon independently built the aforementioned Dr.K project; as a Masters student Chaim built the under-development but playable Comic Book Dollhouse. Both are really interesting new approaches to interactive narrative, built by individuals. There are accessible technologies available. It’s do-able, people, you just gotta make it happen.

On the contrary, I think 3D engine creators picked up whatever interesting bits they saw; they grabbed CAD file formats, scene graphs, and texture mapping and threw them all together. We’re only one or two generations away from those “old” engines.

At the same time, we’re at least five years away from the kind of 3D technology that will really facilitate the kinds of interactivity and art I’d like to have. But it is hardware I’m waiting for, not software and toolkits.

Andrew, who quoted Littlejohn: … inside a reality very much like what he or she is already familiar with: film and television.

But who need a new idiom that is just like the old ones? We already have film and television, and they are intractable as interactive forms.

One of the things that is happening — or was happening, things are a bit stale now — with New Media is that people are building and promoting new forms. CAVE environments, Crawford’s Erasmatron, Littlejohn’s proposal. But are people supposed to take these forms and put their own stories in them? Yes, it seems so. But who are the people who are willing to do this? They aren’t the New Media people, because they are interesting in creating their own forms.

At the same time, the people trying to promote their new forms bemoan all the attention that the established game industry gets. Yet another first person shooter, yet another real time strategy game. Given the success of the gaming industry, we should be placing them next to film and television as winning forms. Looking at games, film, and television, what specifically do we want to borrow from them when we create new forms?

A three act structure? Did Zork have a three act structure?

To really make strides in this area, some real intelligence is truly required. This doesn’t mean human-level intelligence, but it means more than the insect-level intelligence that today’s games have. We need to at least get closer to real animal-level intelligence.

I agree with this and LittleJohn’s points about examining existing AI techniques as pointers for what capabilites we can incoporate into synthetic characters, automated storytellers / directors, etc. to help create a denser and more believable dramatic environment. For example, I think that one of the big wins in Façade, as Andrew mentions above, is this creative, heterogeneous combination of tools.

One of the main reasons we’ve chosen Haunt 2 as the focus of our work is that it offers a chance to center the gameplay around the “capabilites the AI buys us.” The User is a ghost character in the narrative and can “possess” synthetic agents in the world. Since those agents are well-defined with their own explicit goal structure (i.e. they are Soar agents) the User can actually observe and affect that goal structure, thus altering the agent’s high-level behaviors.

While taking existing AI techqniues and trying to understand how they can fit into interactive drama isn’t the end, finding creative ways of putting them together (e.g. Facade, or Marc Cavazza’s “Friends” project at the U. of Teeside, or the other groups Andrew has posted about) is a great step in the right direction.