Thoughts on using chatbots to control NPC conversations

[Cayle]

Has anyone ever seen a chatbot enabled mob?

For my „augmented reality text mud“ (that sounds like an oxymoron), I’ve got a data model for NPC conversations. It is a simplified version my memotica stimulus structure and essentially works like the NPC conversations in Neverwinter Nights. In fact, I could use the Flamewind standalone conversation editor for NWN2 and write a simple python script for importing the XML files into my model.

But something occurred to me. Perhaps I should try an AIML chatbot approach.

Canned conversations carry the advantage of being able to craft complex NPC interactions; especially for quest givers. They carry the disadvantage that many players won’t read the text anyway and that the canned responses limit the players’ interaction options.

Chatbot conversations have the advantage of “being like Siri”; freeform, discoverable and people are apparently tolerant of oddities; to a certain extent. IF you can restrict them to a small range of topics, they might not even break the magic circle.

Thoughts?

[hallsofvallhalla]

i love the idea. I have to admit that I have gotten to the point where I do not read much text anymore in RPGs. They are so boring, stale, and much of a time waster. However if there was meaning to the text other than attempting to explain a pathetic storyline or walk you through why you are rescuing another female then I might read it

[Jackolantern]

It would be interesting, but honestly, due to the fact that these bots are never 100% intuitive, it could possibly take people out of immersion rather than keeping them immersed. Dealing with the oddities that you mentioned, as well as strange and nonsensical responses, it may end up being more of a comic relief than serious story telling at best, or an unmitigated frustration at worst.

I always liked how EQ1 handled NPC conversations, but with a bit of a modification. In EQ1, when you talked to NPCs, certain key words would be highlighted. I think in EQ1, all you had to do was repeat back these highlighted words to get quests, learn more about the world, etc. But what if you took that one step further, and you gave the players a list of verbs as well as interrogatives ("who", "what", "when", "where") that they can string these key words with to get back different kinds of information, unlock quests, etc.? It doesn't really matter that you won't have complex, full sentences spoken back by the player's character. Up until Bioware got involved in RPGs, your own character's responses were typically left entirely out so the player could imagine their own responses. So the player types in something like "where Ari'qfan", "get dragon armor" or something like that and the NPC would respond back from a table that exists on the server that links together pieces of the response based on the words the player chose (or perhaps you have completely crafted responses, but then leave blank slots for ones that don't make sense and the NPC can just respond "I don't understand" or something similar). Maybe before typing "get dragon armor", they may type "what dragon armor" to find out more about it, which may reveal clues about where it is before accepting the quest.

That way you could encourage social exploration with NPCs, while still keeping it intuitive and within set bounds that make sense, all without having the horrendously complex job of trying to implement natural language AI

[Cayle]

It would not really be natural language processing. NLP is regarded as a very, very difficult problem in AI research. The usualy smoke and mirrors approach is using an AIMLbot. AIML is an XML schema for designing conversational responses to input patterns.

It would be interesting, but honestly, due to the fact that these bots are never 100% intuitive, it could possibly take people out of immersion rather than keeping them immersed. Dealing with the oddities that you mentioned, as well as strange and nonsensical responses, it may end up being more of a comic relief than serious story telling at best, or an unmitigated frustration at worst.

I’d speculate that limiting the scope of the conversations would go a long way. Also, if the lore of the game supports it, players mist even expect “odd” interaction.

• NPCs in my game are all incorporeal; i.e. ghosts and spirits. They reside on another plane of existence and there is a presumed degree of attenuation (forget presumed, there are mechanics for it).
• Someone who has been haunting a place for three thousand years is probably not going to tick like you and I anyway. They might even be quite mad.
  As long as the things that the NPC might respond with are in character and they won’t try telling the player where they can get a sandwich when asked something “magical”, I might be able to get away with it.

Up until Bioware got involved in RPGs, your own character's responses were typically left entirely out so the player could imagine their own responses. So the player types in something like "where Ari'qfan", "get dragon armor" or something like that and the NPC would respond back from a table that exists on the server that links together pieces of the response based on the words the player chose (or perhaps you have completely crafted responses, but then leave blank slots for ones that don't make sense and the NPC can just respond "I don't understand" or something similar). Maybe before typing "get dragon armor", they may type "what dragon armor" to find out more about it, which may reveal clues about where it is before accepting the quest.

I'm well versed in the Bioware style conversation, as I used to write NWN mods before getting into PWs. Well designed NPC conversation trees are a MASSIVE amount of work; though I'd reckon that it is not any less than well designed AIML response templates. Now if you are writing the typical, crappy, MMO quest dialogs, they can be cranked out.

[Jackolantern]

In the idea I mentioned above, provided you don't highlight 20+ words in every conversation, creating responses for the verb/interrogative combinations probably wouldn't be too rough, since many verbs won't make sense in many contexts. It may not end up being too much more work than making traditional quest dialog if you had a big handful of clickable "learn more" options

Although it really isn't going to fool anyone into thinking they are really talking to the NPCs. It would just be a bit more explorative than having those choices clickable.

[Callan S.]

I think if the conversation ends up at 'get a quest', then it's just a complicated way to get a quest.

I think if you could also potentially converse and convince the NPC to do a quest for you, that'd be interesting.

That, of course, is for proactive players who want to change the fictional world some way of their choosing, and don't just want a themepark experience.