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From: buzzard@world.std.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: What's this thing we call AI?
Message-ID: <GJsu70.DqK@world.std.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 08:57:00 GMT
References: <a69830de.0109152302.7596d47e@posting.google.com> <20010916125304.12806.00001003@mb-mp.aol.com>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
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Xref: news.duke.edu rec.arts.int-fiction:92673

OKB -- not okblacke <brenbarn@aol.comRemove> wrote:
>Here's my thinking.  We're all pretty much in agreement that games tend to
>be either puzzle-based or story-based.  And, as you say, when we talk about
>very sophisticated programming, we're generally talking about either world
>modelling (simulationism) or AI.  Now, I do think that a sooper-dooper
>simulationist library could be very helpful in implementing some killer
>puzzles.  But I don't think AI is going to be very helpful in implementing a
>good story, simply because if I'm trying to write a story, I don't want some
>intelligent NPC fouling it up with his own ideas on how it ought to turn out.

Being "story-based" is different from "writing a story". Some of us
(hmm, at least one of us anyway) think that the power of the interactive
medium as a medium compared to other non-interactive media comes
from, what a surprise, interactivity. The puzzle-based storyless games
leverage interactivity well; the story-based games don't leverage
interactivity at all--at least on the level of the story.

To express a very simple example of this: if we want the player's
interaction to affect the story deeply, we need to branch (and
not remerge later). If we want 32 decision points, there are
2^32 possible stories. No human is going to write all 2^32 of
those stories out. But a human could sit there with another
human and make it up as they go--only ever writing one story,
but it's the story that accounts for what the player wanted to
do. So one use for AI in IF would be to take that "storyteller"
role--to invent the unfolding plot as the 32 decision points are
visited so that the result is still a good story.

To me that's obviously something a human can't do 2^32 stories--can't
create that experience by "hand", and to me it's obviously a "more
interesting" sort of IF than the plain linear story IF. Maybe Photopia
wouldn't work as well as static fiction as it does as IF, and maybe
Photopia would still be better than a lot of AI-plotted story-driven
games like I just characterized, but I suspect that Photopia couldn't
compete with the best of the AI-plotted story-driven games should such
things really be plausible and ever exist. Maybe I'm wrong there,
or maybe it's just personal opinion, but it seems to me that
if you're an interactive medium, the story that is good no
matter what you do, but which varies depending on what you do,
is better. Yes you can try to do simpler "depends on what you do",
with branches that merge and etc., but return to the human "interactive
storyteller" who doesn't need to work with those constraints.

I agree that AI for NPCs is of more questionable utility,
since they could easily wreck stories or wreck puzzles due
to their unpredictability.

SeanB
