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

[Amanda Walker]

On May 26, 2004, at 2:37 PM, Samantha LeCraft wrote:

> It is possible to do, and if you spend a week at Disney World,
> then spend a week at another theme/amusement park owned by another
> company, the value that the Disney employees add to your
> experience is readily obvious.  So yes, it is possible, and yes, I
> think it adds a lot to the atmosphere and over all experience, but
> like you said "Disney hires thousands of beginner actors".  It
> takes *thousands* of people to make a system like this work,
> hundreds at the very least.

Yes it does, especially for a huge world.  But Disney hires
*beginner* actors.  Nobody gets rich wearing a Goofy suit for the
summer.  These NPC roles don't have to be complex to provide their
benefit, they just have to be more interesting than the animatronics
and the elevator in the hotel.

This, I think, is one of the areas where the movie/blockbuster model
of the gaming industry misses the mark pretty severely.  MMO games
aren't movies.  I would argue that, regardless of Bartle type, they
are closest to theme parks or clubs.  They are a place to go hang
out with friends.  Some people sit in a corner and gossip, others
see who can get the high score on a video game.  Some make up their
own games, or dare each other to set their drinks on fire.  How many
people go to Disney World (or any amusement park) alone?  Almost no
one, even hardcore roller coaster junkies.

> Having worked as in-game Customer Service for one of the larger
> MMOs out there, I would be skeptical that any company currently
> running an MMO would be willing to spend the time and money to set
> up a system like this,

Oh, quite probably not.  The current MMO business model is "get
people to pay $10/month, and try to keep them from getting so
annoyed that they quit."  Of course, there's a chicken and egg
problem here, since subscribers aren't going to want to pay more
money unless the game is more engaging.

> I can't imagine how the Dev Team and CS departments would respond
> to a bunch of actors who likely haven't played the game before,
> coming in by the hundreds.  I would think the Dev Team in
> particular would feel threatened, because these actors would be
> brought in to add content that can't be added by the Dev Team's
> hard work.

If the dev team is controlling the business model, that company is
already way off into the weeds.

Yes, by implication, this does mean that I think most current game
companies are off in the weeds :-).

> But to do any of this, the company has to shift its focus away
> from "development is King" to "service and a good in-game
> experience are _the_most_important_ things we can offer our
> customers."

No argument.  I'd predict that this is going to happen at some
point, and that company is going to make boatloads of money.  Look
at T-Mobile: slurping up cellular customers left and right because
they have actual clueful humans manning the customer service phones.
What a concept, eh?  Compare with AT&T, where you couldn't get a
real human on the line if your life depended on it.

> The company has to be willing to spend more on in-game service and
> interaction with live employees than on on-going development.
> This is a *huge* mentality shift to undertake for any company with
> current MMO experience.

Agreed.  But every company, ultimately, is in the customer service
business.  People will play with a new toy for a month or two just
because it's new and different, but making things interesting is a
lot harder than just making them sparkly.

> It is possible to do, and possibly even worth the time and money
> to do it.  But I think anyone who suggests it as the "easy"
> alternative to developing realistic/believable NPC technology
> needs to understand how much it would take to get a system of
> NPC-actors off the ground.

I don't think it would be easy--setting up any kind of sustainable
business is hard.  On the other hand, I don't think "believable AI"
is easy either, and I've been following that field since the late
70s.  Neither do I think (as the poster I was originally replying to
suggested) that employing actors is cost prohibitive by its very
nature.  Disney, smaller amusement parks, or even themed restaurants
are counterexamples to that claim.

Hey, if I had it all worked out I'd be out shopping around a
business plan :-).  But I do think that the current model is hitting
a number of walls that could be removed by reformulating what an MMO
game is all about, and what an MMO company should be in order to
support it.

Amanda Walker
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