Game Writing and Narrative in the Future - Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing - page 182

There was a time when it was imagined that if a computer could learn to play
chess at a grandmaster level, it would have developed enough intelligence to pass as
a human. It was also considered unlikely to ever happen.
However, in 1997 the IBM supercomputer known as Deep Blue beat reigning
world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game exhibition match. Chess experts
around the world were stunned. How could a piece of hardware have overcome
Kasparov's decades of experience, brilliant strategies, and unpredictable, insightful
human brain?
Deep Blue's programmers had taken a game that was considered a gentleman's
contest requiring subtlety, intuition, and deviousness and reduced it to a program-
ming problem. With the ability to analyze 200 million chess positions per second,
Deep Blue solved the chess-playing problem not with finesse but with brute force.
However, it was not all about computation. The programming team for the super-
computer included a human grandmaster chess player, whose intimate knowledge of
the game helped improve Deep Blue's performance beyond just number-crunching.
Is the challenge of developing Deep Blue really that different from taking on and
solving the problem of creating something like the Game Story Generation System?
It's the End of Game Writing As We Know It
BioWare, one of the few game development studios that employs a full staff of nar-
rative writers and editors, regularly posts job postings for such positions, and in ad-
dition to a resume, applicants are required to submit a dialog sample embedded in a
module created using the Neverwinter Nights toolset. While not a hugely intimidat-
ing barrier to entry, it does require that a writer be familiar with at least one BioWare
game (i.e., Neverwinter Nights ) and gain an understanding of some of the underlying
technology that drives its NPC dialog engine.
When completed, the writing sample will not resemble anything a movie, televi-
sion, or topic writer has probably ever seen before. This requirement may represent a
small step in the direction that the entire industry could eventually move, with only
the most game-savvy writers able to have any hope of garnering work.
In the future, the game writer role itself may bear little resemblance to its current
incarnation. Instead of generating plot outlines, branching story diagrams, cutscene
scripts, and reams of character dialog, the game writer of tomorrow may instead be
more of a co-architect—much as the grandmaster chess player was for the Deep Blue
project—working with AI programmers, speech/audio programmers, psychologists,
and fiction analysis engineers to create a system that can interactively weave an infi-
nite number of story possibilities at runtime based on player actions.
Today's video game writer may be appalled by this vision of the medium's nar-
rative future. Where is the authorial intent, the writer's intuition and muse? These
notions are borne of non-interactive storytelling—vestiges of prior forms that we are
clinging to because they are familiar and comfortable, or because the technology is
not yet here to free us from them.