March 8, 2004
On the ‘Beauty of Emergent Gameplay’
Via Slashdot Games, a new Gamespy article reporting on a recent talk given by Peter Molyneux, whose company’s upcoming release Fable looks to be very interesting. Some snippets from the article on the topics of AI, and interactive story:
… “we [the games industry] have to take on challenges that the academic world has been trying to tackle for years.”
… The central problem that developers have been wrestling with for years is “how do you tell a linear story in a simulated world?” He didn’t propose a solution other than to say that you need to have the world — and the story — react to the character as a gamer plays. Simulation and AI and the other technologies he described would have to be developed to that level.
March 9th, 2004 at 8:51 am
I was chatting with the Head of AI at Lionhead, Richard Evans, today and invited him to drop by and perhaps post his views on this. I was sure he would also find the site very useful.
ian wilson
March 9th, 2004 at 10:41 am
Thanks for letting Richard know about GTxA; it would be great to hear his thoughts. (We’ve had a bit of contact with the Lionhead folk in the past; Peter Molyneux was planning to be on an Interactive Story panel at Siggraph 2002 that Noah and I co-organized and participated in. The head writer for B&W (his name escapes me now) ended up taking Peter’s place, due to scheduling issues.)
We have our own take on the question of the combination of AI, simulation and story, described in our GDC game design paper from last year, Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama, based on a similar CMU tech report. It’s a long paper; the meat of that particular argument is in the ‘Approach and Motivation’ section in the beginning.
Also, for anyone new to GTxA, we’ve addressed this issue in various previous posts over the past year; here’s a list of posts, a subset of which are about AI and narrative.