One of the relatively recent and significant game design innovations is the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to control certain game avatars. As noted by the game designer Ernest Adams (Edge Staff 2007), among the most sophisticated uses of AI in today's games is in the sports genre, where game characters driven by AI cooperate with the player's character to pursue a given goal.
Many games use AI to create autonomous game characters, but their capabilities usually do not extend to interaction through the use of natural language to respond spontaneously to non-scripted input. In fact, attempts have been made to ensure that such interaction does not occur between AI and the player character via natural language. The aforementioned J-RPG action game ICO (2001) which relies on co-operation between the player's character Ico and Yorda, a character driven by AI, is an example of this. Each character speaks a different language, both of which are non-existing invented languages. This design in turn led the game characters to rely on nonverbal communication. According to the game developer, this was a deliberate decision taken to avoid the AI-driven Yorda having to respond to Ico in a natural language to match the player input, which would likely have posed a major technical challenge (O'Hagan 2009a, 223). It can only be speculated that in future, when AI applications in games extend into the Natural Language Processing (NLP) sphere more extensively, AI-driven game avatars may be able to respond appropriately in a given language.
Interactions via written text have been well tried and tested in video games. One of the early game genres is known as “text adventure (see Chapter 1), where the player types words to progress in a game. Despite the advances of game technologies in the intervening years, game-player interactions still mainly rely on button or motion-based commands input via the game controller, and the use of natural language, either written or spoken, in completely free form remains relatively rare.The most recent attempt is by Kinect, which uses the player's body gestures, language, and facial expressions as a game interface. However, this technology is still at an early stage of development and we have yet to see a full spectrum of games emerge to demonstrate the real impact of the innovations. NLP technology has been making steady progress and there is no question that it will increasingly permeate into the game sphere to allow the player to interact freely with game characters via unconstrained natural language, written or spoken, in future with such possibilities already being demonstrated in some games.
The 3D point-and-click adventure game Starship Titanic (1998), designed by Douglas Adams, is an early example of the use of a conversation engine, in this case, called "Spookitalk" to facilitate an interaction between the player and the robot through text. The typed user input is parsed and matched with an appropriate response from the pool of prerecorded phrases, providing a response in written and spoken form. The parser technology behind Spookitalk was VelociText, developed by the Virtus Corporation of North Carolina.124 Spookitalk is a type of what is today known as a "chatterbot" or "chatbot", which is a computer program simulating a conversation with a human through text. Façade (2005) provides a subsequent relevant example of a game that draws heavily on NLP technology. The interactive conversation feature makes the game deeply engaging, in spite of its minimum level of visual sophistication, with cartoon-like graphics depicting the mood of the two game characters, Grace and Tripp. It maps a short sentence typed by the player (who is not represented graphically) to the so-called "discourse acts", where the input sentence is matched to a limited range of reactions – "agree, disagree, criticize or flirt" - by the game characters, expressed in voiced responses, without the system needing to always correctly interpret the meaning of the input (Wilcox 2011). An input sentence may map to a few discourse acts, but the system will link it to the most likely context, preferring a misinterpretation rather than being unable to respond and frustrating the player (ibid.). Designed as an interactive drama, the gameplay develops around the conversation between the three characters, triggered by a short sentence input by the player and the married couple Grace and Tripp who are going through marital problems. Depending on the conversation which develops between the player and the couple, the game's outcome is either their split or reconciliation. Interestingly this game has not been localized into other language versions, possibly because of the technical challenges entailed.
More recently, new chatbot technology has been used to generate sufficiently natural responses to the text input by the player. A case in point is the Sherlock Holmes game 221B (2009),125 which was developed to be played on Facebook in conjunction with the release of the Guy Richie film Sherlock Holmes (2009). Aside from serving as another example of a transmedia movie-game tie-in, the use of chatbot technology makes this online game a relevant example of an NLP application. The technology is used to allow the player – who can assume the role of either Holmes or Dr. Watson - to interrogate in written text witnesses or suspects. These characters are programmed with chatbot to keep the player on track by providing seemingly appropriate answers. Unlike the scripted dialogue often used in games, where the player cannot fashion his or her own line, chatbot allows the player to use a free form of questions in interaction, as in the case of Façade. In a BBC interview with the developer of the technology (Vallance 2009), the test sentences typed by the BBC interviewer playing Dr. Watson were responded to in the form of written text by the suspect/witness Gerald, whose speech is deliberately marked as substandard language through chatbot as shown in the following excerpt:
上一篇：Translation Quality and Users
下一篇：Game Accessibility and Accessibility Barriers in Video Games
微信公众号搜索“译员”关注我们，每天为您推送翻译理论和技巧，外语学习及翻译招聘信息。