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

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 25 May 2004 18:55:11 -0500 
Michael Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:
> J C Lawrence wrote:
>> Michael Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

> Part of the challenge then is to make sure any "flavor" provided by
> believable NPCs isn't obstructive, but that it is integral to the
> gameplay.  Yes, some goal-oriented players will complain because now
> they have to actually interact meaningfully with people, but you have
> to decide if the Diablo market is your main market or not.

Nice call.

>> Coming from the other side the ideal form would be to have capable
>> actresses and actors taking the roles of NPCs with solid character
>> definitions etc.  The (only) reason we don't due this is that the
>> economics are prohibitive.  Ergo, we try and simulate humanity
>> through computation in the form of NPCs.  I don't see that the
>> simulation has intrinsic value.

> For some games it won't.  But if a MUD or MMP game could get the
> effect of actors on staff 24/7 who never break character and who don't
> offer the same stilted dialogue over and over again, and where such
> NPCs were integrated with the gameplay itself, I suspect that would
> add significantly to the players' experience.

Which I guess is core to my point: Would it?  Really?  Which players?
Would this be a one-time one-shot impression, or would it be something
whose continued presence delivers repeated value?  

I like the idea, heck, the engineer in me loves the idea, but outside of
the romanticism of Sirius Cybernetic Real People Personalities(tm) I
don't think there's value there (and even then?).  In the end we're
talking about emotive content and connection, which in turn requires
emotional identification and suspension of disbelief.  More simply, it
requires empathy.  At core the request is to mechanically create
situations where the player will feel human empathy for what the player
also knows is a machine.  That's a pretty hefty suspension of disbelief.

The obvious counter argument is full Turing AI which can't be
distinguished from Real Human(tm), however that effectively recreates
the situation of simply hiring Real Humans(tm) to play your NPCs, as
well as the moral/abuse problems that Samantha LeCraft so clearly
identified.

The other obvious counter is more a more general and even blanket
suspension of disbelief and thereby emotional connection in which the
player doesn't have empathy for the known-machine, but has empathy for
the character the machine is representing in the story.  In essence this
translates to the case of a wonderfully emotive story (say, "Gone With
The Wind" or something), which is put on as a stage play by tin robots.
Of course there are some other differences in that the game player is a
bit-part actor in the story: he plays a mountebank or rebel soldier in
GwtW or whatever.  But in being such a bit-part actor he's also
automatically disenfranchised -- yeah, he's surrounded by the story, but
he gut-level knows that he's an enforced/compelled victim of it (cf the
Tide of History).  He knows that he's playing with mechanical rigged
dice (those tin robots) -- which would seem to leave the opportunity for
emotive connection limited to the case the player has the sense that
he's in direct communication with the designer/author.  Ouch.

And at a simpler level there remains the disjoint between simple GoP
players and the tourists (which is a really lousy and undescriptive name
for them, but was the best I could think of at the time, sorry).  The
primary emotive context the GoP players yearn for is either internal or
in connection with other GoP players.  Similarly the primary emotive
context the tourists work for is the emotional gestalt among other
tourists (cf everybody sticking their arms in the air and screaming on a
rollercoaster).  In both cases the game is simply a machine to establish
a setting, an opportunity, for the emotionally effective event -- and
the actual emotional content doesn't happen between the game and the
players, but among (human) players.

Which kind of restates my point from above regarding empathy, and the
extents to which empathy is bound to human identification.

A possible out is if we step outside of the bounds of GoP games
entirely.  In games like Furcadia, LambdaMOO of old, most of the Tiny-*
clan, bits of There and Second Life etc, backdrop can form a far more
integral emotional role in the game.  It is still just scenery, but now
it is active scenery that is played with, consciously, with deliberate
and knowing suspension of disbelief, to form those human emotional and
reaction structures (cf almost everybody at an SCA meet).  They know
they're pretending, they want to pretend, and they cynically keep half
an eye on the real world while they claim to be King Henry VIII with his
many wives (all of whom manage to be present simultaneously).  In such a
context, yes, maybe, such richer NPC implementations could be seen as
more valuable props -- but are they actually necessary?

Hurm.  Or would such richer NPC implementations essentially lower the
barrier to entry to such roleplay so that non-roleplayers can easily
become roleplayers without having to make as much effort?

> You seem to be arguing that repetitious treadmill play is a good
> thing.  

No.  I consider the current treadmill model both offensive and
dehumanising.  It bugs me and discourages me from wanting to play.
However I also respect the value of treadmills both to game design (goal
provisioning and definition) and to commercial interests.  Heck, the
levels treadmill is essentially a free content mechanism: just crank the
level value on a player and (to an extent) all your old stale content is
now New & Improved! as it has now changed relative position in regard to
the new player form.  Such a deal is understandably unresistible and
therefore common.

> Clearly there's an ultra-hard-core audience for whom anything getting
> in the way of their cheese is an annoyance; my bet is that they are a
> smaller segment than any other except perhaps dedicated PvPers.  

<nod>

I also suspect that the population of SCA-wannabes (for want of a better
term) is far larger than the other audiences among the post-adolescent.
However, as commented above, that puts a rather different role on rich
NPCs than we've been discussing.

> From this POV, people who don't want to interact with anything more
> than a cardboard cutout of an NPC may find themselves in a subculture
> analogous to text MUDders -- defiant in their niche, but largely in a
> backwater as games and play styles change.

Hehn.  And they said reading books was passe.

> That's one way to look at it.  Another way to look at is that from
> Barbie Fashion Designer to Tamagotchi to The Sims, the more believable
> the characters, the greater number of people become deeply hooked
> (though Masahiro Mori's "uncanny valley" looms too).  It's not about
> uber-simulation (for me anyway); it's about human emotive connection.
> Those who want to stay on the "kill monster get gold" treadmill may
> not see the value in this immediately; they are quite literally like
> the lab rat pressing the bar repeatedly to get the random-scheduled
> food pellet, so their needs are essentially satisfied.

<guffaw>

For those interested, nice commentaries on the uncanny valley:

  http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html
  http://jenniverse.com/pastel/057.html
  http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,473054-3,00.html

The latter URL would seem to illuminate some of my points above,
especially in regard to empathy.  I'm also rather curious as to the
exact shape of the graph and haven't been able to find much commentary
on it.  My sense is that while there will be strong cultural variance in
the graph form, the initial peak will be comparatively much lower than
the post-valley rise.

>> From the player perspective in terms of the actual goals that player
>> can be _seen_ to pursue (social, cultural, in-game, etc), what is the
>> actual function of an NPC?

> The answer to that will be based on how much we as developers can
> break out of our own twenty-year-old molds of gameplay.  Can
> believable NPCs add to the gameplay experience in terms of the
> players' goals?  I think so, immensely so.  But we'll see.

If we assume that player's base goals can be divided into two classes:

  1) Get the cheese.

  2) Give me effective parts in interesting emotional state transitions.

and we further assume that "interesting emotional state transitions" can
necessarily only occur between humans...does this still work?

--
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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