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

[Michael Sellers]

J C Lawrence wrote:
> Mike Sellers wrote:
>> J C Lawrence wrote:
>>> Michael Sellers <mike at onlinealchemy.com> wrote:

>> ... 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?

In the early 1980s, I was part of a discussion between some "old
guard" engineers and some new guys at a big tech company.  The new
guys were, as incredible as it may seem, arguing strenuously that
color raster graphics were the wave of the future and would make
computers much more useful.  The older guys didn't see this
happening.  The company made a bet on color graphical workstations
anyway, and quickly the old vector graphics ones were relegated to
history.

Fast forward to e3 this year.  I was fortunate enough to get a demo
of EQ II in SOE's booth.  The game is graphically gorgeous.  The
demo took place on a ship, and I was pleased just watching the
rolling sea.  At one point you interact with an NPC who asks you
(completely scripted) to take care of a goblin that's running around
on deck.  Nice interaction there, really beautiful avatar model,
good use of voice, etc.  But in one instance, the goblin was running
around and around this NPC while my character tried to whack it.
Meanwhile the NPC stood there idling, well, idly.  No awareness, no
reaction.  This was the zillionth time I've seen this kind of thing
of course, but it instantly broke the immersion: I wasn't in any
sense on a ship chasing a troublesome goblin; I was watching barely
interactive graphics and clicking a mouse a lot.  What had been
meaningful pretty quickly became just tedious.

So yeah, I believe that actually adding *character* to non-player
characters would be a big step forward.  It does mean players could
no longer treat NPCs as vending machines, but I have a hard time
seeing that as a bad thing (if you want vending machines to dispense
potions or battery packs, put them in the game!).

Gameplay is about making meaningful decisions toward some goal(s).
For a decision to be meaningful it has to have understandable
consequences.  Current narrowly scripted interactions with NPCs may
have consequences, but only in the old branching-fiction Kings Quest
style (if that); outside of that they're completely flat.  OTOH, we
as humans are awfully good at understanding that how you interact
with someone is going to have significant consequences for future
interactions.  So I believe that adding new levels and types of
non-scripted interactivity to NPCs will greatly enhance gameplay for
all but the most misanthropic of players.  Even for the true GoP,
the NPCs become another element of the strategy-space: "let's have
the cleric go buy that potion.  Last time I was in town I got on the
bad side of that shopkeeper."  I suppose some may see that as
'getting in the way' of their gameplay, but that's like saying a
batting cage is better than playing baseball because all that
running and throwing gets in the way of the game.

> 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.

Maybe.  Our early indications make this seem a lot more tractable
than you might think.  And consider: did you have any emotional
resonance with Buzz & Woody, Shrek, Donkey, Nemo, etc.?  These are
all things we know to be effectively machines -- and not even ones
that interact with us personally -- and yet we have no problem at
all suspending our disbelief and making that affective connection.
In the games space, I already mentioned The Sims in an earlier post.
It's not a coincidence that this is by far the #1 selling PC game
ever, and it's certainly not for the game's graphics (which were
aging when it was released four years ago!).  If people make
emotional connections with even these limited-but-semi-independent
characters (and they definitely do), how much more might they
connect with NPCs that seem to be believably inhabiting the same
world they are (when playing the game)?

>>> 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?

I don't agree with your assumptions.  I'm not sure about the binary
division into goal-types (it sure squashes Bartles' types), but I'm
willing to go with it for discussion.  But I definitely don't agree
with your last assumption.  I do think you refer to a large part of
the difficult nut to crack though: interesting and meaningful
emotional transitions in NPCs are a critical element to making them
believable and have any utility beyond that of info/object vending
machine.

Mike Sellers
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