[MUD-Dev] believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Robert Zubek]

From: Brian 'Psychochild' Green

> Which leads to the gameplay arguments.  The biggest problem with
> real human emotion is that it is often unpredictable and
> frustrating. Consider the whole "battle of the sexes" where people
> complain endlessly because they "can't understand" their partner.
> Are you really going to add something to your virtual world by
> adding this aspect to it?  Is it really going to be fun when the
> female shopkeeper refuses to give my male character a good price
> because some other male just insulted her and now she thinks all
> men are evil?=20=20

I hate to play the "let's look beyond current games" card, but - um,
let's look beyond current games, just for a second? :) Design can
only be evaluated in its context of usage. And MUDs as a genre
follow very specific and limiting conventions, which just happen to
define NPCs as desirably dumb.

But what if we set up the game differently, so that exploration of
the interaction space was rewarding and interesting, even if
somewhat unpredictable and frustrating? I'm talking about an NPC
deliberately authored to deliver a believable story-like interaction
that is the *point* of the game; a coherent, long term conversation
that actually takes you in interesting places. Something like a
mini-Facade, or an AI-driven Castle Marrach.

This doesn't fit GOP games, where players have virtually no
investment in interacting with the characters, and no incentive to
work with what they produce. But it's possible to set up the game in
a way that makes the characters more important and less subservient
to the players. I think your example could be very much fun, if the
total game aesthetics motivated it properly. And I'd much rather
interact with a well-thought-out, well-written character, whose
interactions are designed to be interesting and valuable, than with
an uninteresting Random Player who just happened to log in at the
same time as I. :)

Rob

--
Robert Zubek
http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~rob
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