mycroft

I just ran across this.

I know this is in a pretty primitive stage right now, but it has me incredibly excited for some reason. If it manages to gain a substantial foothold and the technology gets streamlined and all, this could very well shape the future of games.(Or it could go the way of the virtual reality headset)

Imagine, if you will, an adventure game equipped with such technology. It could make the 'conversations' with the NPCs an altogether different affair. The challenge to the player would be to think within the gameworld to decide what to ask the NPC as no discrete choices will be available, the player's emotions coupled with the voice recognition technology (yeah) will drive the conversations. The NPCs will have sophisticated AI with their own set of emotions modeled using either the classic Finite State Machine model, or we could get adventurous (no pun intended) and make them Fuzzy i.e Non-Deterministic. The NPC will have either hard-coded or procedural responses to queries by the player depending on numerous factors, a few of them being the current state of the NPC (the NPC's mood), which is in turn determined by the player's previous queries. The NPC will have significant memory, it will remember the events in the game world (caused by the player) and its responses to the player and other NPCs will be dependent on the knowledge gathered

There would, of course, be a considerable paradigm shift in puzzle design if this were to take place.

Um...yeah so what do you guys think of this? Am I out of my mind ?

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Ninja Dodo

This could be very interesting indeed.

The only reservation I have is that it could seriously mess with your head... and slightly more literally than usual.

WontonGoodsoup

So what if you're playing and then your mind starts to wander and you start to think about ice cream or something like that??

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"I just locked an open door... strange, yet symbolically compelling." - Manny Calavera

Ninja Dodo

The game detects that you're thinking about something irrelevant and, in much the same way as games have done in the past when no buttons are pressed, kindly brings this to your attention.

OR... it just pauses. That would probably be slightly less fascist.

guybrush_guy

i want one! ebay here i come

Risingson

Everytime I imagine that my thoughts can be read, I can't help thinking about dirty sex.

mycroft

LOL.

Assuming that this device doesn't fry your neurons in the first place, it would be great in adventure games with pixel hunting. You would need only to concentrate on a specific area of the screen for the game to realise that you've found the 'hidden' pixel. The interaction with NPCs would reach an unprecedented level. Rather than having discrete choices as to what to ask the NPC or which object to show him, once the dialog has been initialized the player need only think about a specific item for the NPC to respond. However this is based on the assumption that the device works beyond the visual sensory perception impulses. That is, that the object to be concentrated upon need not be on the screen. However, I know that this is too good to be true.

Consider, for example, this sample puzzle. The game is a first-person real time adventure game set in the Victorian era. It is a murder-mystery of epic proportions. Please bear with me.

You arrive at the countryside manor of Baron B as a guest of his long time friend Duke D. The game provides you with information about the gameworld - the mansion, its occupants and the world in general circa 1865. It is up to the player to make good use of this information. So when told by the Duke that his friend the Baron is a mildly eccentric person with particular smoking habits(prefers certain kinds of tobacco, only smokes certain brands of cigars), the player is expected to keep track of this vital information. So when Baron B is found lying in a pool of blood in a room with all doors and windows locked from the inside, the average player will deduce suicide as the probable situation. Since the game is designed in an open-ended fashion, the player is free to use this assumption as a basis for his theory. Nothing is registered with the game, so that acccording to it(the game) no choice has been made. It all takes place in the player's head. As the player progresses in the game, the decisions he makes according to the initial assumption yield no results and contradictory information. He is forced to rethink his entire theory. The general rule is not to formulate a theory without substantial information and knowledge. Minimize guesswork. Correct assumptions and theories will be affirmed by the game in subtle ways.

However, if the player chooses to observe the dead body and the room in general(before coming to any conclusions and forming any theory) he will notice subtle clues when correlated, paint an altogether different picture than what is evident at first. If he observes the ashtray on the mantlepiece, he will observe that it houses a half-smoked and a barely smoked cigar of different brands. The puzzle lies not in finding the cigar placed on the mantlepiece but in deducing what this newly gained information implies. Since the Baron has known to have particular smoking habits, the existence of the other cigar logically implies a visitor. The identity and the motives of the visitor must be first established before coming to any conclusions about suicide or murder.

This is, of course, the ideal way of doing things. The player may take different paths( he may be intrigued by the fresh cut on the victim's palm, the fact that he's wearing boots rather than evening slippers, the absence of the key to the door, absence of matches), but the destination is the same (establishing the existence of a third party).


Now, here is where that brain melting thingie comes in. Had the conversations been implemented in the traditional way, a dialogue option would've conveniently been placed when a conversation has been established with the butler. The player would've normally scoured the room for hotspots and with an appropriate 'Look At' at the ashtray, the game registers that the player has observed the ashtray and proceeds to advance the game by placing the dialogue option. The player normally wouldn't think about the ashtray at all. He just does a 'Look At' at every hotspot in the room. My opinion is to make the player think about the gameworld and the subtle nuances as clues that it holds, rather than handing him the dialog option on a platter. So, assuming that the brain melter also works on offscreen objects( which I highly doubt), the player
upon initiation of the conversation with the Butler has an artificial freedom to talk about anything at all. There are no dialog options to guide him through the mystery, what he asks is of the utmost importance. Now, this differs from the standard text parser style conversation in many ways. Firstly, that the 'tokens' are not pulled out of thin air, the gameworld has specific tokens and the NPCs react to them in specific ways. Secondly, the NPCs are artificially intelligent. They are not storehouses of information about every available subject, their universe of discourse is limited. However, how they behave within this universe of discourse is what makes them artificially intelligent.

Consider the other cigar as one token. In a traditional adventure game if the dialog option had not appeared then one can be sure that the cigar can be placed in the inventory and can be subsequently 'used with' the butler to gain information and to establish the existence of a third party. The inventory and the dialog option are two instances of a particular property I happen to dislike in games. Discreteness. The gameworld is somewhat analog, once you take samples from this gameworld and put it in your inventory, your inventory is a discrete representation of the gameworld. The player is mostly concerned with the inventory rather than the gameworld itself. The cigar is a very important part of the gameworld, once you put it in your inventory(not because you want to, mind you, but because you can) you apply a logical filter. You filter out every object that is not in your inventory (or assign a lower priority to it anyways). The game does most of the work for you by allowing the item to be placed in the inventory. Now if this brain-melter works(and if it doesn't I'm sure I'll find another way) I can do away with the inventory altogether, along with the dialog options. The game will thus give an illusion of chaos or randomness. I initiaite a dialog with the butler and 'think' about a number of things. I can go into various levels of iterations depending upon practicality of the exercise. For instance I 'think' about the dead body, the evening gown, the stain on the collar and so on. Obviously it would be futile and expensive to have a large amount of tokens but the general rule would be to include a token when needed. Since there are no hotspots at all, the player will have a hard time if he wants to play the game in a similar manner as one would've done with a limited inventory by consecutively clicking on the
inventory items. The player's best bet is to observe the events in the gameworld, formulate theories and act according to what the theories imply. For instance, the large bowl of fruit, though taking up significant space in the gameworld, is pretty irrelevant because there are no peculiarities surrounding it. So the player, then, observes the ashtray and the two cigars. If he observes the singular cigar and thinks about what was said about the Baron's smoking habits, he is able to form an intial theory about a third party. This theory is proven valid when during the conversation with the butler, the player 'thinks' about the singular cigar. and as the reponse he gets the answer that the cigar(brand) has never before been seen in the household.

The game may continue from here on with the player looking for clues within the household. For instance the location of the missing matches, the missing key, finding the solution of the problem of the doors and windows locked from the inside and so on...

It should be noted that the above miserable excuse for a puzzle, is based upon my assumption of the brain frying headset and that the player is able to concentrate on objects offscreen.


Hmm...
Excuse me while I go bend some spoons...

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jjacob

Heh, you're optimistic No but seriously, I don't see this technology adapted to gaming in the next twenty orso years. This hardware/game-thing was made purely for scientific purposes (see it as a prototype), to see if this could be done. It's merely the continuation of a very old project. I believe they managed to make a skiing game some 10 years back in which you control the characters X axis (lef and right movement) while going downhill. The only (typical) drawback was that the machine had the size of an overweight snapshot-booth. The principle was that, if they could detect controllable thoughts (like thinking of a difficult math question, or spelling a difficult word), they could control a computer (game) with it. The MAJOR drawback was, however, and STILL IS, that the device is still only capable of 'detecting' either A or B. This technology works differently but also similair. There are boxes on the screen that are flickering at different frequencies, by focusing on either one of them, your game character will balance left or right. I don't know about you but I don't like flickering things in my games It's also an indication that this technology has very limited possibilities in gaming, but alot of possibilities for people who can't move at all. So if you'd want to control a game focussing on spots on the screen using your brain, it'll probably be a long time before we can detect that using a headset, It's more likely we'll someday use our eyes for controlling that aspect. In other words: I think this is the wrong technology for the applications you're implying. (What do NPCs have to do with anything at all, btw?)

Personally, I find this alot more exciting: Nasa develops "mind-reading" system

In short: they've found a way to detect what a person is about to say. This works with small sensors near the vocal chords or something like that. Anyway, the fun part is, it appears we can use it to "speak without speaking" (WITHOUT ANY LIP MOVEMENT) . One of NASA's goals with this is to make it available for every cell-phone, they actually see this being used in crowded public places. So far the software is only capable of comprehending six words and 10 numbers, but it picks it up 92% of the time, making it (IMO) alot more reliable than any vocal voice-recognition already. Ok, it is, in itself a form of voice-recognition, but capping the 'signal' somewhere in between the brain and the vocal chords seems an amazing accomplishment to me. If the technology is really this reliable, I don't why it couldn't be put in adventure games in the NEAR future!

It wouldn't be all that hard I guess. It would be cool to see someone implementing like some form of keyword-recognition, for example: In an AG;
if you need to know where an artist is performing tonight, you just say (or not say ) the following:
"Hello, Do you know where G-blahblah is performing tonight?"
Then the game would pickup the words "know", "where", the name of the artist and "tonight" among others, and based on that information, it should know what you want to know. Since most recent AGs seem to have vast amounts of dialogue, and most of which either completely irrelevant to game or exagerated into dullness, I don't see why they shouldn't make a line of dialogue for all possible story-related questions, right?

Ahhh, just dreaming..