Telltale goes text?

RAnthonyMahan

As you probably saw on the blog, Telltale employee Bruce Wilcox won this year's Loebner Prize, an annual award for chatbots (Congratulations to both Bruce and his bot, Suzette!). An interview with Bruce revealed this interesting tidbit about a future Telltale project.

What do you see for the future of your bot or bots in general ?

Natural language is the way we should be interacting with computers, so my bot and others are just a step along the way. Scribblenauts is a game that allows a lot of nouns and adjectives and I'm working at TellTale games on a game that does nouns and verbs. All of this is going toward NL.

I doubt Telltale's going to make a text adventure anytime soon (but oh, how awesome that would be), but unless the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park can only be stopped through the power of words, then it's safe to say this is our first glimpse at an unannounced game with a new gameplay technique.

Speculate away.

dentbuds

I doubt that they would use this mechanic in Jurrasic Park. I see Jurrasic Park as being a more time-based game. A point-and-click game where you can actually die if you don't solve the puzzle fast enough. Something like this probably wouldn't be put in it. The idea of having to write in certain words could open a lot of cool oppurtunities, though. Probably something like Peasent's Quest, except 3D.

thesporkman

Oh, man. A Telltale Peasant's Quest sequel would be amazing!

GuruGuru214

I can think of one announced Telltale project that would benefit hugely from the inclusion of chatbot software. One with four characters with huge amounts of personality, any of which would be a riot to have a conversation with.

I'm calling it now, Poker Night at the Inventory.

Origami

^
Nice deduction.

thesporkman

In the interview he said he was working on "a game that does nouns and verbs." That sounds like a verb-noun text-adventure-style parser to me.

Whatever they're working on, I'm really excited to see it!

PainDealer

GuruGuru214 wrote: »

I can think of one announced Telltale project that would benefit hugely from the inclusion of chatbot software. One with four characters with huge amounts of personality, any of which would be a riot to have a conversation with.

I'm calling it now, Poker Night at the Inventory.

I really, truly, madly, deeply hope you are correct with this one. It would spray my brain all over the walls like a contact buckshot to the head :eek:

dentbuds

thesporkman wrote: »

Oh, man. A Telltale Peasant's Quest sequel would be amazing!

I thought of it after I wrote it, and I too thought that it would be awesome. Probably better as a part of the pilot series, as episodic might not turn out as good. Brothers Chaps and Telltale, read this post and be inspired!

KuroShiro

As someone who has studied a lot of Linguistics and specifically Syntax, I can say with a fair amount of confidence that being to program anything like a true Grammar of a natural language into a computer is still a very long way away. A more limited (i.e. incomplete) one is feasible though, and has actually already been done as a sort of input to output machine at some Universities.

Molokov

Anyone remember Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic? That was Adams' attempt to bring back the natural-language text adventure with "modern" day graphics (mid-90's graphics, this is).

Unfortunately both the story of the game and the language parser weren't that great, but there was quite a bit of decent comedy in the writing for the chararcters.

It would be interesting, with Bruce's AI work, to see if you could combine the text adventure "conversation" idea with Telltale's adventure game style.

divisionten

I hate to chime in like this, but a free chatbot game like this exists- and I did mention that it's free, right? It's called Facade. It's not perfect, but it is a pretty good indication to show the kinds of stuff a chatbot-conversation based game could do.

The plot is simple- you've been invited over to a friend;s house whose marriage is on the rocks. You can play as either a boy or girl and try to help them fix their disputes, create a bigger rift, or even try to woo one of the two in the couple. It's not without its flaws, but still rather impressive.

puzzlebox

divisionten wrote: »

a free chatbot game like this exists- and I did mention that it's free, right? It's called Facade. It's not perfect, but it is a pretty good indication to show the kinds of stuff a chatbot-conversation based game could do.

I played Facade a few times yesterday, and I actually found it really frustrating. The characters were like whinging children having little passive-aggressive tanties. I didn't want to spend time with them at all, let alone help them sort out their marriage issues!

It did make me realise how much I value the level of understanding and communication that real people have though. Half of my frustration with the game stemmed from not being able to say what I wanted to say and have the characters understand it with any kind of nuance. Thank goodness real life isn't like that.

I'd be interested to see how good Suzette is.

thesporkman

puzzlebox wrote: »

I'd be interested to see how good Suzette is.

She's online. You can talk to her here:

http://66.150.245.139/chat/

taumel

It only takes a few words (one question) to know that this isn't a real person you're talking to. Maybe it helps if you're beeing lobotomised or at least completely drunk. There once was a nice listing around on the C64, which created poems out of the words you feed to it.