Usually, chatbots get their clients into short interaction sequences quite nicely – most people will try and write something into that interface box. The question is how to keep them coming, how to take whatever it is they throw at me and wrap a story around it so that they get curious enough to ask: “Why?”. I don’t need outside characters to provide drama, because the communicative situation between a human and a bot is inherently dramatic in itself. Man and machine are trying to understand each other – that’s drama right there.

Also, chatterbot technology doesn’t generally provide means for creating experiences with story structure. Since chatterbots are relatively stateless, there are no computational structures like goals, dramatic beats, behaviors and so forth that give the author hooks for structuring the experience.

True, but it’s relatively easy to extend chatbot technology, using the programming language of one’s choice, and incorporate all kinds of structural models and devices. The problem is not how to give chatbots structure, but which structure to give them. I just think that a three-actor structure is too hard to implement at this moment, and that concentrating on two actors might be easier.

Once the project is finished and others can play it, I’m sure we’ll be writing up various post mortems about what we believe did and didn’t work, and why. We’ll be really interested to hear everyone else’s take on it, of course.

And I very much agree that it makes sense to solve the relatively simpler problem of just a few characters on screen, before tackling a massively multiplayer narrative.

I may be more of an optimist about that, Andrew. I’ve be following the paper trail of Facade for more than three years now, and I was always awed about how ambitious a project it is. It might just have been too early to try developing a three-actor drama, whilst the dynamics of an interactive two-actor drama have not yet been explored.

I think we need to figure out two-actor drama first, and I think that a good medium to use for this exploration is chatbot technology of some sort. I think that we need to develop systems that can generate narrative for just one PC and one NPC character before more PCs/NPCs can get involved, like you tried to do it in Facade. You were just a bit early and a bit brave :-)

Yes, it’s going to require years (say, 20+) of research and experimentation to get to the level of sophistication we’re talking about here. (Note that video games have already been around for about 30 years, so another 20 sort of seems reasonable!) I’d guess that several people, including myself, are willing to predict it will actually be possible to achieve these kind of results we’re talking about here, with enough effort. Hopefully there will be interesting milestones along the way.

but at the cost of making narratives that has the linearity that I think narrative (or many other art forms) require

The descriptor I like to use for what you’re talking about is “cohesiveness”, or perhaps “cause and effect”; “linearity” I think implies inflexibility.

Facade may be the breakthrough

No, no, far from it… We’re hoping Facade makes varying degress of progress in several directions, but in terms of actual generativity, which is what I’m advocating here, Facade is only marginally generative. Like I mentioned earlier, such a system needs to be writing the sentences themselves, not just sequencing them.

But, if you shoot for the stars, you might just hit the moon. With Facade, maybe we’ve made it into orbit.

Thanks for the kind words though.

So with a certain skepticism, I guess I think that a narrative-centered, world-centered virtual environment is going to take huge amounts of handcrafting for the forseeable future.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, the kind of results you’re hoping for are not going to be feasible with handcrafting. It’ll just be too labor intensive and cumbersome and messy to brute-force / hand-author a solution; it’s too huge of a problem. I thought and hoped differently in the past, but now I am sure about that (as is Michael, who says he pretty much always knew :-).

There is currently no solution to deeply interactive cohesive narrative. The community need to invent new technology (-gies) to solve it. We’ll be experimenting and writing about it for the forseeable future. Kind of like the genome project or something, it’s a problem we could spend our lives on if we choose, it’s that much work. But I think crackable within our lifetimes.

So with a certain skepticism, I guess I think that a narrative-centered, world-centered virtual environment is going to take huge amounts of handcrafting for the forseeable future. I will be delighted–ecstatic–to be proved wrong, because what you’re working on is really the only realistic, viable possibility of something like this happening.