[MUD-Dev] Natural Language Generation

[mugginsm at under-the-fridge.com]

On Tue, Jun 01, 2004 at 12:31:01PM +0200, Hans-Henrik Staerfeldt wrote:

> I believe the maximal time I have observed people being fooled by
> an Eliza type chatter bot with some simple build in response
> patterns was about 10 minutes. After that the response was often
> to kill the NPC whenever the player sees it from that point
> forward. The builtin

I too have done that, although I don't consider the traditional
LPMUD "Harry" to be all that serious an attempt these days :)

My view is that merely attempting to make an NPC pretend to be a
human is what frustrates players. In a text based game, it's not
like a room description is trying to fool the player into thinking
they're actually there. A game sword doesn't trick the player into
believing they *really* have a sword. So why should a computer
controlled character necessarily try and fool the player into
thinking there's real intelligence there?

To me, an NPC that I can interact with in a consistent manner (not
spending hours guessing the synonym that triggers quest information
or finding the one NPC that is actually interactive) to perform game
actions *in game terms* is just right.

An NPC barkeep that can divulge information, or that regulars can
ask to throw irritating customers out of the bar, or that can pass
messages on to other regulars is just fine. Give it a consistent
interface:

  "ask barkeep to <action>"

  "ask barkeep about <thing>"

for example, and it works. Some MUDs do this quite well already with
individual NPCs, but the interface needs to be more consistent
across all of them.

The moment it breaks immersion and becomes frustrating and annoying
is when the NPC tries to *fool* me into thinking it's human. Because
it can't. Not this decade, anyway.

I think NPCs are excellent game resources, but trying to make them
"real" is actually counter productive.

- Colin
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