With all due respect

Eder

P.s.:please give me a dirrection to send u guys those pictures and some a my art.LONG LIVE THE FABLE!!!

The repetition is particularly bothersome because Fable is clearly doing so much keeping track of the world, and using it to shape other choices of language. More than once I’ve had the experience of the person I was interacting with doing an unacceptable repetition while, simultaneously, I could hear people in the background saying things that did a pretty good job of reflecting the ways my actions had changed the world, my reputation in the world, etc.

- Yes, without voice synthesis that’s acceptable we can’t get much beyond choosing between a (hopefully large) number of pre-recorded lines. Of course, you and Michael are getting a bit beyond this with Facade by cutting-and-splicing the pre-recorded lines. I really look forward to your forthcoming paper on Facade’s conversational behaviors.

- As for multiple solutions, you’re right that everything I’ve written here should be read in context. The context is my interest in the fact that it’s implemented on the level of language and character. It’s the fact that a bridge keeper, faced with something that’s not part of the scripted story, has something to fall back on besides “I don’t understand that” or Simlish or whatever. It’s the fact that the mini-quest for crossing the bridge is “part of the story” but implemented in a way that’s connected to the keeper’s presence in the virtual world (connected to character, rather than “story part x can be completed one of these ways”).

- I completely agree with your analysis of the GTA:SA discussion we’ve been having in “bigger isn’t better” — the pleasure would come in combining exploration and fictional development. And there are certainly things it would only make sense to have happen, say, outside of town. But I wonder if we should even have to traverse all the space to get outside of town, then. People have complained a lot about the “fences” in Fable that keep them from arbitrarily moving around the virtual world. I understand this, but I don’t know if long sections of travel without meaningful events should actually be a design goal. I mean, I think California’s beautiful, but I’m glad Dustin Hoffman doesn’t have to drive up and down it multiple times, in full detail, when The Graduate plays. It’s even okay with me that he crosses the Bay Bridge in the wrong direction. Not that I want to subvert all exploration, but I might like to be able to say, in one of these world games “use a couple long shots to establish that I’m traveling from where I am now to [particular place I've already been] and get it done in 10 seconds unless something important happens on the way.”

On the one hand, for the “world” dialog, it basically seems like they came up with a certain number of NPC types, a certain number of NPC states, and a certain number of conversational discourse acts / contexts, and then wrote out all the combinations of those, or had their voice actors improvise them. That seems sort of simple. On the other hand, without AI to help generate those dialogs, i.e., rules that use different sentence types and word choices depending on an NPCs attitude, etc., and then voice synthesis to speak the generated dialog — the latter being the bigger technical problem, actually — there’s little way around this brute-force approach.

What happens when a player repeats a discourse act (e.g., greet, insult, etc.) for a given NPC type/attitude combination? For example, if you “wear odd clothes” in front of an NPC twice in quick succession, do you hear the same dialog again? Some discourse acts, e.g. “insult”, I assume could change the NPC’s attitude towards you, so when repeated, could result in different NPC dialog being spoken.

How is what you’re calling “subversion of hoop jumping” much different than multiple solutions to a game obstacle? I.e., a player can talk their way past the bridge keeper, or kill him, or marry him, etc. Perhaps it’s not that common for narrative games to offer multiple solutions to obstacles, and it’s true that implementing it requires the designers and writers to robustly handle more narrative permutations, and it’s a great design goal, but it’s not a particularly new idea. I haven’t played the Deus Ex games, but I remember reading that multiple solutions was a big feature there. I’m sure many text-based IF’s offer multiple solutions to certain obstacles. … Anyhow, perhaps what’s most impressive about this to you in Fable is that the dialog stays coherent and robust when pursuing these different solutions to obstacles?

I’m glad to hear that Fable allows NPCs to mix together their “story” dialog and their “world” dialog. However I cringe in the first place when I hear there’s such a dichotomy between the “story” and “world”. But, from the way you’ve described it, they seem at least weakly integrated, which is good. Based on your experience so far playing Fable, do you think players who were unaware of the implementation would notice the seams between “story” and “world”?

(I note that “story” and “world” dialog is a bit analagous to the “beats” and “global mix-ins” structure we built when writing Facade. Both Fable “story” dialog and Facade beats are designed to progress the drama — they are the heart of the story. Facade’s global mix-ins are a broad, general set of additional dialog, like Fable’s “world” dialog, but in addition to just providing a range of coverage, global mix-ins also progress the overall drama towards a crisis and climax. More on this in an upcoming paper that gives more detail on how Facade’s conversational behaviors are implemented.)

I also slightly cringe at the idea that one of the fun things to do is to hunt for verbal easter eggs. Not to discourage players from wanting to hear lots of the good writing — I’m all for that — but ideally it’s integrated as part of the game itself. For example, if the narrative were designed to be played over and over (which Fable is not, correct?), it would give you the chance to hear alternate dialog, without requiring you to artificially hunt for it. I think I’ve had an allergic reaction to that kind of activity ever since those multimedia-ish pieces of the 1990’s that require you to click everywhere on the screen to try to find all the objects that will react. I’m glad to hear Fable’s AI discourages this by making some/most of your verbal interactions actually count towards something, effectively preventing players from just screwing around with NPCs with no consequences; that wouldn’t be very believable behavior.

Finally, Noah, I think you’re right on when asking for game designs that are dynamic enough to “plug in” most/any characters in a large world into the template of the grander narrative. You’re wanting the system to be more generative, which I strongly feel is the right design goal. Someone in the previous discussion about GTA:SA wondered if that would deflate any motivation to explore the world; if you can have your narrative with only the characters and objects in your immediate vicinity, because the system can dynamically work with them in that way, then why explore at all? My guess is, I doubt it would come to that; even with a dynamic system like we’re talking about, there will be other reasons to explore.