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Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

> Game NPCs don't need AI

> ... more cost effective is to just fake it!

Many players complain in story heavy games that their choices have no consequences to the story - this is largely because building stories with meaningful branches isn't economically feasible.

A game that could make NPCs react to the what the player does dynamically while also creating a cohesive story for the player to experience would be absolutely groundbreaking in my opinion.

This is more in the realms of AI story generation but I haven't seen any work on this that generates stories you would ever mistake as coming from a human (please correct me if I'm wrong) so it would be amazing to see some progress here.

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You're talking about different problems.

Story AI is basically having a writer sit down and writing a branching story tree with writing the whole way. At best it's a manually coded directed acyclic graph.

Tactical AI, ie having the bad guy soldiers move about the battlefield and shooting back at you in a realistic manner is 100% about faking it. It's better to despawn non-visible and badly placed enemies and spawn well placed non-visible enemies than have some super smart AI relocate the badly placed enemies into better locations. It's better to have simple mechanisms that lead to difficult to understand behavior than complex behavior that leads to instinctive behavior.

There was an amazing presentation at gdc maybe 3 years ago that perfectly articulated this. The game was something about rockets chasing each other. I wish I could find the link.

If you can find the link, please post it. I'm interested!

Found it!

https://youtu.be/1xWg54mdQos

> Many players complain in story heavy games that their choices have no consequences to the story - this is largely because building stories with meaningful branches isn't economically feasible.

That's not entirely true - it's just that no games studios are willing to compromise on graphics and art for something silly like the ability to impact the game world.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic about the "something silly" part, but do you have any examples of any games (indie, commercial or academic) that let you meaningfully impact the game world?

I think they don't exist because it's an exceptionally difficult problem, even for games with lo-fi graphics or text only. I've found it hard to find any AI projects that generate stories or plots that are remotely compelling.

Big studio game companies push "your choices matter" as a selling point as well, but few deliver.

Minecraft is successful precisely because you can meaningfully impact the game world.

Minecraft doesn't have an overarching story or complex NPCs though.

Fallout: New Vegas, a bunch of Telltale games, Myst/Riven, dozens of JRPGs (Chrono Trigger/Cross come to mind immediately) with branching endings and characters who survive or die based on player actions. Yeah, games are made all the time where the player has a meaningful impact on the game world.

> any examples of any games [...] that let you meaningfully impact the game world?

Dwarf Fortress

Agreed about the meaningful choices and dynamically generated reactions from NPC, but general AI is not needed for this in my opinion.

You also have to consider whether the complaints of "many" players matter when publishing a game. A percentage of vocal players will complain no matter what. Yes, they will complain even if you somehow implement true AI!

> Agreed about the meaningful choices and dynamically generated reactions from NPC, but general AI is not needed for this in my opinion.

Maybe, but it would be an impressive demonstration of AI that would be very different to what has shown for Go, Chess and StarCraft.

I think a compelling AI written short story for example would be leagues ahead of what is required to write a convincing chatbot e.g. you need an overarching plot, subplots, multiple characters interacting in the world, having to track characters beliefs and knowledge, tracking what the reader must be thinking/feeling.

It would likely rely a lot on understanding real-world and culture knowledge though - Go and StarCraft are much cleaner in comparison.

> A percentage of vocal players will complain no matter what.

Yep, but I can't think of a single game that has a plot that meaningfully adapts to how the player plays. Either there's many endings but the path to get to each is short, or all the choices converge quickly back into the same path.

Again, please correct me if I'm wrong but I've look quite hard for examples of innovation in the above recently and haven't found much. You can find examples of papers on e.g. automated story generation or game quest generation on Google Scholar from the last 10 years but the examples I found weren't that compelling.

AI-generated "true" fiction seems like scifi to me.

Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but...

... what is "true" or "good" fiction is up for debate. In fact, it's a debate that can never be solved, because there is no right answer except what it feels to you, your friends and authors you respect.

But that said, I seriously doubt it would fool me, and I think it won't be within reach of an AI any time soon, or ever, not without creating an artificial human being from scratch. And maybe not even then, because how many real people can write compelling fiction anyway? :)

> Of course an hypothetical "Turing Test" of fiction-writing might be able to fool some people, and in an age where Netflix has been accused of producing content "by algorithm" this seems increasingly possible, but...

So it feels like you should be able to procedurally generate stories at least something by combining common story arches, templates, character archetypes etc. without too much effort but I've yet to find any compelling examples of this anywhere. When you look into the problem more, you realise it's a lot harder than it seems.

We've seen lots of examples of chat bots that are said to pass the Turing Test but really aren't that intelligent at all so a "Turing Test of fiction writing" as you put sounds like a super interesting next step to me.

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