Game Writing and Narrative in the Future - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 180

Interviewer: What do they have against you?
PARRY: They are out to get me.
Interviewer: What for?
PARRY: I have incriminating evidence against the mafia.
Interviewer: Are you sure of all this?
PARRY: You don't believe me? 3
The above sample conversations were typed by the human user and answered with
a computer-generated string of onscreen text. They would probably feel a lot more
realistic if the user were able to speak his questions and hear human-sounding speech
in response.
Beyond just generating dialog that sounds right, has the correct inflection and
emotional emphasis, the GSGS would need to have a good understanding of charac-
ter motivation and how those motivations might evolve and change over the course
of a game based on what the player does and what happens in the world.
Comprehend player speech. Of all the required components, the ability to rec-
ognize human spoken language is probably the least formidable. Many off-the-shelf
programs already do a fine job of this. In fact, it's surprising that more games don't
already take advantage of this rapidly improving technology.
However, processing and interpreting the meaning of improvised player sentences
is something else entirely. More than a clever mimic like ELIZA, the GSGS would
need, on some level, to truly understand human language. This feature is as chal-
lenging as the earlier requirement to generate original dialogue, perhaps even more
so. It requires a system that can consistently pass the Turing test, and it is something
we may have to wait a very long time to have at our disposal.
Storytelling. Finally, the Game Story Generation System would need to have a
sense of the dramatic, incorporating a good understanding of story structure and
plot devices. This is perhaps one of the hardest things to imagine a computer pro-
gram accomplishing, though even today there are software packages that claim to
do just that. Dramatica, for example, is a combination fiction theory and software
package that is billed by its creators as the “ultimate writing partner�—a computer
program that fiction writers can use to analyze and improve their stories' structure.
When it comes to crafting a tale, certainly no game story system will ever be
able to favorably compare to a talented human writer. However, the requisite story
quality level will not be nearly as high for an interactive system, either. That is
because whereas most storytellers are judged by observers, game story systems will
be judged by participants only. And a story that you're in the middle of instantly
becomes much more potentially interesting than a story about someone else.
This brings us back to D&D : have you ever noticed that when a D&D player
tries to recount an adventure he experienced, no matter how excited and enthusiastic
3 Bertram Raphael, The Thinking Computer (New York: Freeman, 1976) 201.