During the course of the discussion
several difficult problems were mentioned that we would not be able
to solve, but were worth highlighting. These include scaling high touch
experiences, the role of authorial voice, and ethical issues,
Solving the problem of scale
Mediation of player experiences
ultimately leans towards creating psychological situations where players
choose of their own free will to act in a desired manner. In ARGs and
narrative spaces, the most powerful tool available is the puppet master,
a human actor who guides and adjusts the experience to the player's
current needs. Many years of experience have taught game designers that
players will always react mostly strongly to the prods, suggestion and
presence of other human beings.
Unfortunately, finding skilled
people to fill these mediation roles is time consuming and often futile.
It is a new role that most practitioners stumble upon by accident, not
one supported by schools or trade organizations. Once you do find a
competent game master, you run into problems of scale. A single game
master can handle a few hundred players in an emotionally meaningful
manner. With games hoping to reach millions of players, all those game
masters start costing you big bucks. High touch experiences, mediated
by live human beings, are exceedingly costly.
Luckily many puppet master
activities are relatively mundane, such as giving new quests or acknowledging
the completion of real world activities. Also, they are time limited
to a few minutes or less of actual contact with the players. This has
lead several participants in the group to attempt to create high touch
experiences by building emotionally engaging, highly social NPC characters.
General purpose AI is an unsolved problem, but perhaps if we limit the
scope of what we are attempting, we can create an effective helper.
The Shrike:
We all need a little AI Jesus to help us make the right decisions
The goal is to have each game
master control a herd of AIs that handle most moment to moment interaction
with the player. Based on the user responses, computer simulations can
be run of the user's mood, and the AIs can adapt their responses accordingly.
Extreme situations can be brought to the Game Master's personal attention,
at which point the GM can seamlessly take over. The entire time, the
person on the other end operates under the assumption that they've been
talking to a real human being.
Attempts thus far build on
the psychological models of the player we mentioned earlier. Designers
build proactive NPCs that poke and prod the player in ways the AI models
suggest will result in desired behavior. Current research in this
area includes:
Building believable
personalities that include inconsistency, unreliability, etc.
Ensuring that the
NPCs are goal-oriented with long-term, deep agendas.
Focus on opportunities
for influence mechanics rather than combat/conflict.
Generating artificial
social structures, populated by AIs that create social norms and goals
for the player to operate within.
Giving AI's knowledge
of player's existing social graph in order to inform NPC decisions.
For example, the AI might suggest that you, as a powerful guild leader,
form an alliance with another powerful guild leader whose group is becoming
too isolated and risking dilution. This creates meaningful conflict
that adjusts the layout of the social network in predictable ways. The
AI is ultimately playing a strategy game that involves manipulating
and cultivating the social graph of the player community.
With such tools, the hope is
that a game masters can use its socially-aware NPC army to support thousands
of players in a high touch, emotionally meaningful manner.
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