[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Believable NPCs (was Natural Language Generation)

[Nicholas Koranda]

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*  REPOST
*
* Original Poster:  Robert Zubek
* archer at frmug.org
*
* Tue May 25, 2004 8:22 pm
*
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From: Michael Sellers

> Believable characters OTOH -- with or without NLG -- will make
> gameplay much more immersive and consequential. Imagine asking a
> tavern keeper NPC for info on where to buy good weapons. Consider
> how his responses might differ based on whether he's seen you
> before, whether you tipped well last time, whether and how he's
> heard other NPCs (and PCs) talk about you, and, say, whether he
> heard you were flirting heavily with the blacksmith's daughter (whom
> he happens to be in love with), or were the one to save her from
> ruffians. This goes way beyond script- or knowledge-based
> responses, but provides much more interesting player-related context
> for even the simplest menu-driven interactions. 

Speaking of which...

I'm working on believable social characters right now - building a
system that participates robustly in real social interactions via
natural English text. Unlike chatterbots (Eliza, Alice, etc.), it
actually contains knowledge of the long-term structure of human
interactions; it tries to make the conversation coherent in the long
term. And it concentrates on the more pragmatics-heavy kinds of
interactions.

Here's a paper about the system, that'll be presented at this
summer's AAAI Challenges in Game AI workshop:

http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~rob/publications/character-participation-in-social-interaction.pdf

I'd be curious to hear what everybody thinks of the approach or the
system... :)