Ok... this goes in the "Amen, brother!" category. Kris Erickson at PS3Informer.com wrote a column entitled Why Procedural AI is the Next Big Milestone in Gaming. In it, he smacks on the problem of ostensibly large-scale world with very repetitive content. He sums it up with one question:

How can we create realistic open world games where people that we meet in the street repeat more than the same 3 phrases over and over ad infinitum?

Can that be any more accurate?

At the upcoming AI Summit at the Game Developers Conference, I am on a panel "Characters Welcome: Next Steps Towards Human AI" where I hope to bring up this very notion. My observation is that, until we can solve the natural bottleneck of content creation, in-depth AI is going to be hamstrung. It doesn't matter that we can create 100's of subtle behaviors and interactions if our characters only have the voice acting and animations for 20.

With the reasonable success at procedural animation for Spore's creatures, I feel that we may be able to leverage that for human character animation. Many games are already using varieties of automatic animation creation (which, not being my speciality, is completely beyond me). However, we are definitely up against a wall with regard to voice assets. Until we can do realistic generation of speech, we are going to be hurting for a way to accomplish dialog interaction without pre-written lines for voice actors.

Even if we could pull of natural-sounding speech, automatically generating content is a bit of a quandary as well. If you have time to read 200 pages, I've started muddling through my colleague Rob Zubek's PhD thesis, Hierarchical Parallel Markov Models for Interactive Social Agents (pdf). I am only about a quarter of the way through, but I like where he's going with it. By applying rational reasoning to interactive speech patterns, we are taking a big step forward in being able to process input speech as well as generate responses. Combine that with natural-sounding speech synthesis and our games will take a massive leap forward.

In the mean time, I believe we have to apply procedural concepts wherever necessary to be able to bypass the content generation pipeline such as it exists now. After all, GTA 4 had a $100 million budget and people still thought that the content was limited. Can we, as an industry, even afford to continue down this route?

Labels: dialogue, GDC 2009, GTA, interactive, procedural animation, speech, Spore

This comes from an IGDA (International Game Developer's Association) article by Mathew Sakey. He is discussing how dialogue in games tends to be a real drag. The reason it caught my eye is because of the implications (if not outright pleading) that better AI is potentially a solution. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Part of it is that we are still roleplaying with circuit boards, and technology means it's going to be that way for a while. When the day arrives that we're actually roleplaying with the game AI, and not a pre-scripted database of reactions… well, that day we can just do away with other people altogether and it'll be great. But right now – and despite the never-lived-up-to claims of some developers, including a couple mentioned here – game AI advancements seem irritatingly focused not on character and world reaction to player behavior, but on combat skills, so it's going to be a while before The Elder Scrolls MCMLXXV responds in a genuinely dynamic way to our remarks and activities.

Motion controls, voice recognition and reputation systems are all moving game worlds in a direction where we're not playing, we are participating; where
we are not in the game, but of the game. It is the difference between roleplaying with humans and doing so with a circuit board – human conversation dynamically changes based on thousands of subtle cues computers simply cannot track. As the technology and software evolve, we'll naturally see ever-more organic dialogue opportunities in games, provided developers take them.

I believe that this is a fascinating field - but one for which I have no concrete answers. Even setting aside the issue of whether gamers would want to muddle through dialogue (which is also discussed in the article), it is challenging from a strictly technical and academic standpoint. The game Facade tackled this issue (pretty much from a strictly technical and academic standpoint). I saw a GDC presentation on it back in 2004 and have seen it discussed, but I can't claim to have played it. Maybe that should be a stop on my sojourn through this great unknown landscape that is the future of game AI.

Labels: dialogue, Facade, Mathew Sakey