AI
Do AI-powered NPCs and machine-authored narrative chart a positive way for ward for games? And what is being risked?
The use of AI to create dynamic player experiences is hardly new. Mike Cook, a game designer and AI researcher at King’s College London, points out that in the 1990s, in the Creatures series, AI was being used to create characters that learned from their experiences, and Lionhead’s Black & White did similar a few years later. “The difference today,” he says, “is that lots of proposals to use AI in games are to replace things people already do just fine, like writing or art.”
Case in point: the tech demo showcased by Nvidia at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, where users were able to talk directly with the proprietor of a cyberpunk ramen shop via a microphone, the spoken responses coming from generative AI. “I don’t think
Nvidia’s vision of AI-driven NPCs is very good, or very sensible,” Cook says. “It makes for an eye-catching tech demo, but it’s not a very well-thought-out idea.” From a technical standpoint, he reckons getting something like this to perform consistently would be a nightmare. “How can you QA an NPC that can talk about anything, to make sure it’s not harmful or misleading?”
Meghna Jayanth, narrative designer for games including Thirsty Suitors and 80 Days, is unimpressed with a technology that essentially removes the writer from the equation. “It’s boring,” she says of Nvidia’s tech demo. “An expensive, energy-hungry solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, that fundamentally devalues and misunderstands creative labour.” That misunderstanding, as game consultant and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail sees it, comes down to a question of meaning. Adding generative AI to NPCs won’t mean they’re more interesting, he thinks – “it just means they say more.”
After all, dialogue isn’t just content to fill a space, or use up the player’s time; it’s there to communicate something, ideally beyond the simple facts of exposition. All AI-written dialogue can offer, Ismail argues, is novelty. “I’d love talking to a weird barman in a cyberpunk city,” he says. “I’ll try and break it a few times, I’ll try and get it to say something inappropriate for the setting, and then I’ll get on with my life.”
Furthermore, the freedom to talk about anything with an NPC might actually be offputting to players, suggests Emily Short, who was previously creative director at Failbetter Games and has worked with natural language processing at Spirit AI. “You might have some people who really like the challenge,” she says, “but ‘you can do or say anything’ feels uncomfortable to many people, because what if they get it wrong? How will they know what they’re supposed to do? What if t
