Problem: User A corrects “parser mistake” X one way, User B corrects the same X another way. What does the program do?

Use a statistical or layered learning system of some sort. The system could weigh the user’s own corrections much higher, but use data pooled at the server to fill in the gaps.

(One of those pie-in-the-sky ideas that should maybe work, but I haven’t given any thought to how much computing power it would take to pull it off … maybe a lot.)

I don’t particulary like the perspective, either, but four years of experimental results indicate to me that any such depth has to be handcrafted in if I want it in. There’s neither technique nor technology that will enable a virtual character to make emotionally meaningful decisions or motivate it to take passionate action on its own. It’s all in the authoring.

Implementing artificial self-awareness is, as I’m experiencing it, a gruesomely laborious process. Tools will help, but most of them can only be built when the work process is mapped out much better, and much more is known about the actual results on humans; right now I’m afraid that more sophisticated tools will close off or cloak possible routes of exploration without me even noticing. Practice will definitely help; I expect to be much better at this in a couple years. Technically, everything works like I want it to; I can rig up a system that does quite fancy stuff with abstract prototypes in an amazingly short time now. The hard part really is the content creation – “motivate, motivate, motivate”. If I ever hear a screenwriting teacher use that phrase again, I might tell him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about until he writes stories with characters in them whose motivation is completely unknown.

Not everything that can possibly happen. Everything that does happen. You don’t have to work out complex causal chains on the fly that way. Just give the system a start condition, remember all the events and what events caused what events. Then when the player asks why something happened, a character can tell them. Or not, if you want to have deception happening.

I think this approach is one of the most promising. Centering an interactive story system on the concept of each character as an artificial storyteller, that remembers what they’ve seen and done and heard, and telling each other and the player parts of the story.

Then you get the game to asynchronously share data it’s learned on translating natural language with other copies of the game (or a central server which processes the data and shares a summary form with clients) …

Problem: User A corrects “parser mistake” X one way, User B corrects the same X another way. What does the program do?

Hm – maybe give each client a seperate parser, which they can customize? As long as it’s guaranteed that each client runs in its own thread, each could evolve its own language…

Problem with the above “solution”: networked games installed on public terminals, e.g. at libraries. You’d probably have to have a non-customizable parser set as a default, with a “customize parser” option in the “advanced” settings.

Oh, and have the “advanced” settings, turned off by default, and only turn-on-able using a password.

What if you used a logographic language internally but let the player enter their stuff in natural language. Just below where the player is entering you would show the logographic interpretation of the players command.

I really like this idea.

The first objection might be that it makes parsing bugs transparent to the user. But this could (maybe, possibly) be turned into an advantage by allowing the user to correct the parser’s mistake. Maybe this could be a user-friendly method of giving input to some form of a learning parser.

Then you get the game to asynchronously share data it’s learned on translating natural language with other copies of the game (or a central server which processes the data and shares a summary form with clients) …

does that mean you now think you should prototype the full drama?

I’ll hijack this :-P. All the non-interactive-story-tellers I know prototype their drama. Most storytelling teachers teach the use of prototyping tools for storytelling, such as exposés, treatments, story layouts and story event networks using index cards and pieces of string, and various other graphing formats. My beloved Dramatica can be regarded as a rapid prototyping tool for stories.

I think (and I’ve witnessed) that the question of how to express such prototypes in interactive code is currently being attacked from various angles. Michael’s formulation of the goal – a machine that outputs abstract representations of story events, given inputs of various types – works very well for me. I even went as far as choosing a prototype-bases over a class-based system architecture, so all newly-created objects start out as renamed copies of prototypes, and, after modification, can themselves be prototypes.

Interactive drama is hard precisely because it takes the modeling and simulation of open-world games, applies it to character psychology instead of character physics, and requires that the overall experience satisfy complex global constraints.

I agree with interactive drama being hard, but I’m afraid that if you actually do it the way you say you do it here, you’re making it too hard for me, as a writer. To me, applying the modeling and open-world simulation of games to “character psychology” rather than “character physics” seems impossible. I’m not saying that you can’t do it, but I can tell you why it’s too hard for me.

In Spore, the player gets a GUI to design animatable characters. Let’s say that I design a two-headed, three-legged character called Love Child. Because of the genius of Will Wright and his colleagues, I can actually get my character to move from A to B, though it will move in a fairly weird way. Haha, that looks funny! Do I know what it means? Sure I do – it means that the laws of physics are in effect in this game. Since on the box it said “Create interactive characters and see them buckle under realistic gravity!”, I expected this to happen. Since the whole effect is accomplished by numerical calculations, and the context doesn’t shift (as long as the laws of physics don’t change), Will Wright’s system has to create the right numbers and types and pass them around, but he never has to explain their meaning to the player, since the player is expected to do that part of the job herself. As long as the developers get their numbers right, this kind of of modeling and simulation will work within the limits of this kind of application, for the foreseeable future.

But what if I get the GUI to design Love Child, but on the box it says “Create interactive characters and talk to them!”? I create Love Child and watch him hobble along; “Haha, you look funny!”, I tell him. And what does he reply? “What do you expect, you cruel idiot?! You only gave me three legs, and those two heads aren’t doing much for my balance, either!”

Whoa.

Can we get there? I don’t know, but I know that this sets the direction in which I want to move. Am I trying to get there by applying the modeling and simulation used in current games to “character psychology” instead of “character physics”? Hell no – as a writer, I stand no chance to do that with numbers. Maybe you can figure out how to do that, but I‘ll have to use words instead of numbers, and instead of using the laws of physics, I’ll have to do my modeling and simulation using the laws of storytelling.

Like the laws of physics, the laws of storytelling are based on the assumpion of a general cause/effect relationship. In non-interactive stories, writers are free use this property of stories to cause all kinds of dramatic effects: 1. something happens , the cause of which the audience can’t possibly know – 2. later, something else happens, also by unknown cause, but which the audience might or might not feel has a connection to 1 – 3. finally, something happens that shines a wholly different light on everything that happened so far; in a moment of revelation, the cause/effect relationships of all past events become clear (provided that the audience has been active the whole time).

But if the audience is not only expected to be active, but is expected to be interactive, I can’t write it that way. If I’m an interactor in an interactive story, and something happens that I don’t understand, I expect to be able to ask a fellow interactor – whether human or virtual -, who has witnessed the same event, why this has happened. And if they can’t, I want to know how this is motivated. And if that motivation seems interesting enough, I might want to know the motivation for that, and so on…

Even worse, if I see a creature that moves in a funny way, and the creature is supposed to be “intelligent”, and supposed to understand natural language, I expect it to be able to give an intelligent answer to the question “Why do you hobble around so funnyly?”, even if I know perfectly well why, because I made it that way! To please me, the creators have to explicitly explain the cause/effect relationships for everything that can possibly happen in an interactive story. I do know that some engineers claim that they can do interactive characters by abstracting away details, by averaging, by using “dialog acts” and “drama managers”. Good for you. But I can’t possibly understand how you can cause this effect, given the fact that I, as a writer, work in a world where “average” is antithetical to “character”, and where the detail is virtually all that matters. However, if you can pull this off, I’ll be full of reverence.

i also wonder if a few parsed commands really constitute a language, They may not feel unnatural because we only have to remember combinations of letters but we are not in the languageworld unless there is a full descriptive linguistic way of thinking.
Hmm are languages really defined by concepts that don’t slip easily between different languages? If so, if languages are defined by their unique special meanings, then a parsed language is not really a parsed language unless we can only completely think inside that parseable (a word?!) languageworld.
Sorry for a bit of philosophizing there. Enjoyed the notes.

To me, that seems to give the advantages of both approaches.