Speaking with your Sidekick: Understanding Situated Speech in Computer Role Playing Games (original) (raw)

A Framework for Playable Social Dialogue

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment

Non-player characters in games generally lack believability and deep interactivity. The AI system Ensemble begins to tackle this by modeling social state and behaviors for game characters. With previous versions of Ensemble, the player initiates social exchanges and the system generates the dialogue and outcome and displays them in their entirety. In this paper we present an extension to Ensemble comprised of a model of playable social dialogue called social practices. Social practices increase the playability of character interactions and add interactivity at each stage of dialogue. Additionally, this work enables a more modular form of authoring to support the additional complexity.

Automating Direct Speech Variations in Stories and Games

Games and NLP, 2014

Dialogue authoring in large games requires not only content creation but the subtlety of its delivery, which can vary from character to character. Manually authoring this dialogue can be tedious, time-consuming, or even altogether infeasible. This paper utilizes a rich narrative representation for modeling dialogue and an expressive natural language generation engine for realizing it, and expands upon a translation tool that bridges the two. We add functionality to the translator to allow direct speech to be modeled by the narrative representation, whereas the original translator supports only narratives told by a third person narrator. We show that we can perform character substitution in dialogues. We implement and evaluate a potential application to dialogue implementation: generating dialogue for games with big, dynamic, or procedurally-generated open worlds. We present a pilot study on human perceptions of the personalities of characters using direct speech, assuming unknown personality types at the time of authoring.

Requirements for Spoken Conversational Agents In Games

Term Paper in the GSLT-1 course Speech Technology, 2005

Spoken conversational systems have mainly been designed to collabo-rate with a user to solve a particular task, such as managing bank trans-actions or book travels. Now the development has reached a point where new areas of application may be possible, such as in digital ...

How Players Speak to an Intelligent Game Character Using Natural Language Messages

Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2018

AI-driven characters that learn directly from human input are rare in digital games, but recent advances in several fields of machine learning suggests that they may soon be much more feasible to create. This study explores the design space for interacting with such a character through natural language text dialogue. We conducted an observational study with 18 high school students, who played Minecraft alongside a Wizard of Oz prototype of a companion AI character that learned from their actions and inputs. In this paper, we report on an analysis of the 186 natural language messages that players sent to the character, and review key variations in syntax, function and writing style. We find that players’ behaviour and language was differentiated by the extent to which they expressed an anthropomorphic view of the AI character and the level of interest that they showed in interacting with it.

“Situated AI” in Video Games: Integrating NLP, Path Planning and 3D Animation

1999

Abstract This paper investigates the integration of Artificial Intelligence techniques into video games, from the perspective of voice controlled adventure games. Speech-based interfaces would add new dimensions to the control of video games. However, the integration of speech raises several issues, such as the adequate level of interpretation that should be carried by the system.

Under the Influence: using Natural Language in Interactive Storytelling

Interacting in natural language with virtual actors is an important aspect of the development of future Interactive Storytelling systems. We describe a paradigm for speech interfaces in interactive storytelling based on the notion of influence. In this paradigm, the user is mainly a spectator who is however able to interfere with the course of action by issuing advice to the characters. This is achieved by recognising corresponding speech acts and mapping them to the plans which implement characters' behaviours in the story. We discuss some examples based on a preliminary, yet fully implemented, prototype.

AINI-embodied conversation agent applicable for interactive games

2008

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in general have advances this field in realizing the vision of a more humanoid interactive system with embodied conversation agent (ECA). This paper presented our development of the ECA called Artificial Intelligent Natural-language Identity or AINI. In this paper, we also present and discuss the use of such ECA for inclusion in interactive games. We present the technical design of our ECA and its performance.

A Lightweight Videogame Dialogue Manager

1st Joint International Conference of DiGRA and FDG, 2016

We present a fully procedural alternative to branching dialogue that is influenced by theories from linguistic pragmatics and technical work in the field of dialogue systems. Specifically, this is a dialogue manager that extends the Talk of the Town framework, in which non-player characters (NPCs) develop and propagate subjective knowledge of the gameworld. While previously knowledge exchange in this framework could only be expressed symbolically, such exchanges may now be rendered as naturalistic conversations between characters. The larger conversation engine currently lacks a player interface, so in this paper we demonstrate our dialogue manager through conversations between NPCs. From an evaluation task, we find that our system produces conversations that flow far more naturally than randomly assembled ones. As a design objective, we have endeavored to make this dialogue manager lightweight and agnostic to its particular application in Talk of the Town; it is our hope that interested readers will consider porting its straightforward design to their own game engines.

Designing Natural-Language Game Conversations

This paper reports on LabLabLab's three year experience in game-design oriented research on interactive dialogue with non-playing characters and developing natural-language conversational games. It explores the specific affordances and constraints of natural-language interaction for game conversations and offers strategies for their effective design. It also examines the general notion of conversational puzzle and proposes interface-agnostic design approaches founded on the concepts of cognitive conflict and conversational moves.

Supporting Dialogue Generation for Story-Based Games

Providing compelling, realistic, immersive game worlds is one of the major goals in modern game design. The presence of unique and interesting dialogue for all of the characters in a game enhances this sense of immersion. In this paper we present the concept of an "Intentional Dialogue Line" that supports the efficient generation of multiple variations of a dialogue, where these variations are both unique and appropriate to the character who is speaking them. This paper focuses on how machine learning can be used to quickly populate the intentional dialogue lines with existing content.