Save the Chatbots, Part 2!

_{Electric Boogaloo!}

My last post on chatbot-driven games got me thinking, and I see a limitation I don't like.

A big part of the feedback in a game is feedback loops. You do something, something happens, you do something based on that, something happens based on that.

The issue is that most games use a recursive loop, but these games wouldn't. Let's see if I can say what I mean.

In an RPG, you walk around a world, and what you are near are depends on where you have walked before. Every step subtly changes your location, bringing you closer to some things and further from others. Similarly, when you kill an enemy, it gives you points and gold and so forth. Although the victory itself is win/lose, the side effects in terms of expended and gained resources are very muddy, and can be anywhere on the scale of goodness. Winning a fight but using up all your magic is almost a loss, even though you won. Moreover, all of these feedback loops - fighting, walking - are more or less unlimited. Save for unusual restrictions, you're allowed to walk around and fight as much as you like, "cycling" the loop at your pleasure.

On the other hand, in this chatbot game, everything is binary. You either uncover the next bit of information or you don't. You either convince the chatbot of something or you don't. It's impossible to cycle this in an unlimited fashion without creating some kind of unusual pseudo-AI, and there are really no variable side effects because there is no engine to track them.

Even if you aren't specifically stuck to a single linear story, you're still going through this only marginally interactive set of scripted rails.

I'm not saying this is at it's heart a bad thing, but it is a very limiting thing.

With this, you cannot realistically allow the players to just dick around. Either it has no effect at all, or they're moving forward. You have to script every possibility, which means that the players are more exploring your story and less exploring your world. They might as well be reading a book that only lets you turn the page if you answer a riddle.

I'm not saying this is an innate restriction of chatbots. I'm saying that it's an innate restriction of games without recursive algorithms. Because the content is not implemented in a fashion that can be unlocked in tiny portions in many different ways over many different times, the content is grotesquely inefficient.

Creating a dungeon is a lot more work than writing up a description of a dungeon. But the implemented dungeon can be explored by players in many different fashions at many different speeds, and there can be many different progressions of fights and treasure. Moreover, depending on how the player explores the dungeon, exploring the dungeon gets easier or harder.

So, a player will read a description of a dungeon and think, "okay, cool, a dungeon". Two minutes later, you had better have another description of something and it had better make sense. Even then, the player has less of a feeling of agency. It's an inferior solution - I would guess your time is spent at maybe 1% efficiency when creating non-recursive content.

This is actually the fundamental problem with adventure games in general, and is probably why they are not as popular. While there is something very juicy about the fact that every obstacle has a unique solution, the fact is that there are only maybe 1/50th the number of obstacles that you'd find in a recursive game of the same length. For every unique obstacle in an adventure game, you've fought four battles and gotten an upgrade in an RPG. Each battle is not simply an obstacle, but a complex set of interlocked obstacles. Same with upgrades.

This is probably why I preferred Quest for Glory to King's Quest: Quest for Glory contained a number of recursive, interlocked systems in addition to the juicy unique puzzles.

Now, it might be possible to create a chat-bot game that has recursive systems, but the fundamental issue here is that chatbots are essentially just memory banks with confusing UI. No chatbot on the market has the ability to create meaningful content or adapt to changes in the world on any interesting level. You would have to create a backbone that somehow determined what changes needed to happen and then modified the chatbot's memory banks. This would be difficult even without the complex world engine, because generating English that is fun to read is right up there on the list of unsolved problems.

This is the big reason that games with adaptive/generative worlds don't have talking NPCs in their generated parts. Any talking NPCs they have are back in the part of the game that can't be significantly altered by the player's recursive play.

This is why when you talk to, say, characters in Animal Crossing, they always seem so self-obsessed and oblivious. It's because they actually cannot notice when you change the world, except as they are scripted to. They cannot look at what you have done and say, "wait, in order to get to your door I need to wade through a river, what's up with that?" They are not only incapable of that level of logic, they are incapable of generating that kind of text.

This is why graphics are so popular: we have, over the decades, figured out a lot of nifty ways to recombine and adjust graphics to a recursive situation. With some newer games, you can even create completely new graphics inside the game itself - a completely unique face, most commonly.

In some respects, I think it's because graphics is easier. Graphics is simply N-dimensional bits that are linked and moved around algorithmically. Wide cheekbones? Alter the cheek bits a bit. Green skin? Change the color of the skin.

What is language? Written language is a maybe low-dimensional construct that is representing a maybe medium-dimensional construct (spoken language) that is representing some theoretical reality!

But I don't actually think that's any harder. Graphics are just as steeped in cultural references and represent theoretical reality, and graphics are 2D representations of 3D representations. (You can count color as another dimension, I guess.)

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's easy. After all, computer graphics aren't easy.

But maybe the same approaches could be taken...

I'll have to think about that, I've gotten off track. What I'm saying is that it's very hard to use chatbots in a recursive game, and that's a restriction I can't bear.

Luxury Notwithstanding...

There are a growing number of games (or, more accurately, game-like chatrooms and social networking sites) that are all about meeting people and flaunting what passes for your sense of fashion.

The one that's been getting the most attention recently is, obviously, Home on the Playstation III. But there are lots, literally dozens of them. All of them are passably similar: Home is simply more graphically advanced. An older one that still gets a lot of press is Second Life, although it... is a little different.

The vast majority of the chatrooms and social networking sites are bubbles. They can't keep their audiences, period. There are lots of theories, generally accompanied by handwaving about niches and saying, "if we only had more users, we could hit critical mass..." Hrm. Wrong. Let's talk about why they really fail.

I'm going to come at this as if entertainment and play all spring from the same basic system, so I'm going to refer to these pieces of software as if they were games. You can certainly argue that they're not supposed to be games. In which case, you've just explained right there why they always fail. So, as if they were games.

Playing a game can be thought of as exploring an evolving terrain. How well you can explore and interact with various parts of the terrain changes based on your capabilities. In most MMORPGs, you can actually go to any map you'd like, but you'll get your butt kicked if you're not the right level. Putting together and leveling a team is the fun part - advancing your ability to explore and shape the terrain, and in the process exploring the "terrain" of the level and equipment system.

Terrain doesn't always mean physical terrain, of course: in a MMORPG, you shape terrain by killing monsters and collecting loot. Solitaire has a terrain built out of cards, where you explore by stacking cards in specific ways. Changing and exploring the terrain of cards is, again, the focus point.

I could argue it for any game, but I'm going to presume it's fairly clear by now: games are about exploring and changing terrain.

Now, let's take a look at MySpace. Met with a polished but cluttered front page, I click "comedy". I'm faced with another cluttered page filled with links to what are presumably intended to be comedic pages. I'll click on Michael Gelbart. Voila, video, a couple of other links, and some extra information. I'll be nice and presume the video clip is not his best work.

The point is, I'm now exploring terrain. At whatever speed I please, in whatever way I please. And, if Gelbart pleases me, I can look for related links. Even better, I can always watch for more Gelbart in the future. The terrain evolves. I could send Gelbart fan mail, or post to his comments, or whatever else I wanted, and I might even get a response, a shoutout, a friend, or a linkback. Of course, his "MySpace level" is 23,214, whereas mine is zero, so it might be an iffy thing to try. Might want to level up some first by integrating into the terrain of the game.

It may sound like I'm stretching, but I'm not. Although the methods are different, being on MySpace has a lot of underlying similarities to killing trolls in WoW or driving cars over hookers in GTAIII. I doubt it was designed that way, but enough mutations and you'll end up with one that's viable...

Now, 95+% of the wannabee-MySpaces fall short. Their terrain isn't deep enough, or doesn't react enough, or isn't permanent enough, or some similar problem.

In SecondLife, the terrain is deep, but it's nonreactive. The vast majority of the socialization must be done live, which is too intensive and irritating for the bandwidth available (text and emotes). Sure, it has its place, but that place isn't in long-term viability. This is a problem a lot of 3D chat rooms have. I haven't done anything with Home on the PSIII, but I wouldn't be scared to bet fifty that they suffer from this problem, just from seeing their ads and previews.

On the other hand, most "social networking" sites go another direction, where the terrain is so sparse that it's simply not interesting to explore. "It's supposed to be functional!" Functional is something users want to come back to, not forget.

So what's the secret?

Terrain that is interesting enough to make exploring it entertaining. Terrain that reacts, but at the player's preferred speed. Terrain which varies as to how responsive it is. And complex rules linking it all together. (In most cases, the complex rules are people's personalities.)

A system of personal webpages enhanced with friends lists, content stacks (blogs, vids, pics), and forums is basically ideal for this. Going 3D requires... some interesting changes. Changes I haven't seen happen, yet.

I'm sure you can be successful without this, but it will be because you have other terrain which does get explored in this way. For example, SecondLife's social scene is tenuous, but it has a fairly complex economy, crafting system, and real terrain that interacts in ways like I explained above. Their "social"ness is painfully bad chatroom standard, but they have other terrain to explore.

...

Now I'm probably going to be on the top twenty for Michael Gelbart searches. That's Google terrain, there. Not quite as juicy, but the same basic idea.