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Marilyn Walker表示需要在游戏角色对话中融入玩家个性

发布时间:2011-04-16 14:12:10 Tags:,,

加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁兹分校游戏和玩乐媒体计划自然语言和对话系统部门总监Marilyn Walker于4月15日在学校名为“游戏的未来”专题报告会上发表演说,深入探究公司如何触及可对玩家互动做出回应的生成性对话。

首先,她展示了《质量效应2》的截屏,这款游戏因其荣膺控制器游戏时代最扣人心弦的互动式剧情而广受赞誉。她表示,尽管这些年来游戏业有所发展,但对话模式几乎仍与20年前相同。虽然游戏的故事情节很精彩,但可能无法真正打动玩家。她提出如下问题:这些对话选择有意义吗?这种体验故事的方式是人们想要的吗?玩家是否完全融入故事之中?如若不然,编写更多对话和对话树能否解决问题?

她引用了来自BioWare的James Ohlen的言论,他说道即将面世的MMO游戏《旧共和国》所包含的内容比其他BioWare游戏加起来还要多。她指出,这需要大量的文字作为铺垫。如果我们能够生成NPC的对话,那么可以制作出何种与众不同的游戏呢?(游戏邦注:这里“生成NPC的对话”应该是游戏根据玩家个性适时调整对话的内容和方式。)

质量效应2

Walker说道:“机器生成的对话可以让NPC在游戏互动中融入个性化,我们可以通过游戏了解玩家的个性并以此为焦点展开对话。现实世界中,人们讲述故事时轻易便可表现出自己的个性,但对于大家在口头叙事中采用的有趣方式,目前我们在游戏中甚至连模仿都做不到。”

开发者的目标是使游戏有其真正的内涵,对话触动人心。目前还没有游戏可以做到这些,因为我们还未让玩家在游戏中体验到个性化内容。她觉得,如果开发者在对待这个问题上无法抛弃整个程序性语言时代的架构,就无法找到解决方案。

幸运的是,科学研究工作已为此奠定了基础。Walker表示,她已就社会心理学上的五大人格特质(游戏邦注:包括经验开放性、尽责性、外向性、亲和性和情绪不稳定性)做了大量的研究工作。依其所述,这50多年的研究为角色语言行为提供了科学依据。即便环境和情况也会有所影响,但这些极具普遍性的特性确实能够发挥作用,也有证据证明这些特质符合生物学基础原理。

查看电影业对角色原型的研究论文或许无法得出心理学模型,对构建对话模型也无丝毫指导作用。但如果你仔细审视作品本身,也就是电影,或许可以从中分析和构建角色类型。接下来的问题在于,制作角色模型是否能够增加互动小说作者的创造性。游戏团队正在从电影脚本中搜集对话,开发潜在的角色原型。她说道:“我们正在考虑能否从中提炼出有趣的参数模型,可以加以模仿设计与原本存在差异的角色,突出不同点。”(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,转载请注明来源:游戏邦)

Future of Games: Generating Natural Language For Game Dialogue

Marilyn Walker, Director of the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Games and Playable Media program’s natural language and dialogue systems division, presented a talk at the school’s Future of Games symposium today that delved into how the group hopes to get closer to generative dialogue that can respond to player interaction.

Bringing up a screenshot of Mass Effect 2 — widely praised for being the most compelling example of interactive narrative in this console generation — she said while games have evolved, “for dialogue it still looks pretty much like it did 20 years ago.” While a game’s story can be compelling, it may not truly reach players. “Are these dialogue choices meaningful? Is this the way we would want to play the story? Are we getting engaged and getting into the story? Is the solution to write more dialogue and having more dialogue trees?” she asked.

She brought up a quote from BioWare’s James Ohlen, in which he said that forthcoming MMO The Old Republic has “more content than every other BioWare game put together.” That’s quite a lot of writing, she noted. “What kinds of different games could we make if we could generate NPC dialogue?”

With machine-generated dialogue, “we could personalize what the NPC says to this game interaction,” Walker said. Through play, “we could learn what the player’s personality was” and speak to it. “Human storytelling is so fundamental it’s easy to draw out that human transportation,” but “the games that we have now are not even near being able to mimic in any interesting way what really happens in human oral narrative.”

The goal is to “make games really have meaning, and speak to your heart. We’re nowhere near games doing that because we’re not drawing in what’s personal for you when you’re playing a game.” We won’t find a solution for this, she feels, “without throwing the full architecture of procedural language generation at this problem.”

Fortunately, work in the sciences has laid down a foundation that can be worked with, she said. “I’ve done a lot of work with the big five model of personality from social psychology,”which describes people in terms of five basic traits, Walker said. This affords a “scientific basis for character language behavior” with “50 years of studies” behind it, she said. “Even though the environment and situation has an influence… there are these very general patterns you see that seem to be dispositional and there is evidence that they have a biological basis.”

And when you look at film studies literature on character archetypes, Walker said, “you do not get anything like the models you would get from the psychology. You get nothing from which to build a conversational model, but if you look at what’s actually authored” — meaning the films themselves — “you might be able to analyze and build classes of characters.” The question, then, is “if by creating models of characters we can increase the creativity of authors of interactive fiction.” The team is currently scraping dialogue from film scripts and developing potential character archetypes — such as, for example, “Alfred Hitchcock leading ladies” — which could Eve be applied in games. “We’re looking and seeing if we can extract interesting parameter models,” she said. Which can be used to create a caricature, “a snapshot or imprint of a character; compare against a norm, and the accentuate the things that are different.” (Source: Gamasutra)


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