Miss Personality
[ roleplaying games | uncategorized | video games ][ AI | bioshock | connecting | context | experience | levine | NPC | storytelling ]
[ September 14th, 2011 ]
[ by: Spikey ]
Oh, this hits the goods in me.
I just got affirmation that my ramblings are not on the wrong side of tracks. I mean, Ken Levine of Bioshock fame recently floored the audience with the latest iteration of Bioshock franchise. He (ok, the team) didn’t do that by reinventing pixels, but by giving the artificial characters incentives, agendas and ability to act true to the context they’re in. Giving them, hopefully, traits and unexpected people personalities that make the journey from begin to finish a little less lonely tube affair. Well, in practice, it’s not that rosy but damn close as it’s not scripted into unconforming timeline. It rather tries to react to where the player goes, what he does and what’s around. Mirroring and angling the surroundings.
I mean to say, ahem, damn. Yes. This is how narrative and being-there experience and involvement and all the other once-vapour golden ideas will be done. By recognizing the need for them, and then shoveling resources at them like it was nobody elses business, because it’s not impossible unless you keep blindly listening to grey-faced suits who project future core targets based on what has sold in the past five years. Don’t look there. Future ain’t in the past, unless you take into account other mediums and forms of storytelling. Like, I don’t know, books or television series with people in them. Possibly interacting with each other. Ok, that was slightly on the trolling side but how else can it be said?
I’ve often heard how a properly done AI companion could feel like a buddy on coop-mode at your side. Watching the AI / NPC gameplay video, that goes right down the drain. Know why? Your buddy is never present.
Let me open that one.
When your best mate evar is playing alongside with you, you see only his actions and the resulting effects. Solved puzzles, blown guard towers, whatnot. What the videogame and the mission requires. However, when you turn to look at the guy or the gal you’ve spent your childhood with, falling in sync from trees and hitting the curb face first while barreling downhill with crap bicycles, you don’t see him/her. Just a badly animated videogame character that slides around and repeats the videogame motions.
No visual connection or context to tie with, nor personality shining through. Your bud can do just what the player character is limited to do, and that’s always in minority compared to AI characters who need to connect with at least the context of the story and dialogue when interacting with the player. Player model, who incidentally, stands proud and motionless like a big tree, deferred light glimmering in his normalmaps.
Point being, you can’t properly connect with a stiff slidey videogame construct that has less naturality to its movements than an average kitchen appliance.
Your NPC buddy AI companion thing is not limited, though. As in the gameplay video, he/she can project very human traits — constructed, of course, but if they’re triggered by the surroundings and situation, they can become human. They become something player can relate with. Almost human reactions, if you may. If there’s an underlying structure and balance between predictability and unpredictability, they start to give off a whiff of a personality behind the actions.
Of course, there are logistics underneath. Building personality through animation, context sensitivity, AI, sound design, dialogue and all the other cogwheels of the machine is a massive task and there’s no sense nor chance to populate whole game world with such characters. It’d be awfully nice, of course, but then designers and writers would break their heads trying to make the key characters stand out. The mass and weight of it just needs to be recognized and placed accordingly in the game, to have it impact the world and story.
In regular co-op, as fun and blast it may be, your best bud fighting alongside you isn’t going to humor you by sticking his head into a barrel and testing the echo for the fun of it. That’s not acting out in a world together. It’s more akin to perhaps scooting radiocontrolled cars around a track together. Bloody good fun, yes, but try and stick that into a narrative context and something’s gonna be missing, unless just watching events unfold from synchronized actions counts. Sometimes it does, but even then it has to be done from the get go with that in mind without shooting for what can’t be done. Recognizing the means, etc.
Of course, getting back to the gameplay video, nothing’s done right until it’s in the hands of everyone and receiving actual love and tears. So far there’s only a glimpse of gameplay video, and cynicism is easy. I for one try and be optimistic about this, as I take this bloody personally. Now, that camera and some of the strained sort of animation.. Ah, can’t have everything in one go, can I?


