Hi all,

I’ve been hanging around this forum for a few years but I’ve never presented myself nor my work. Here goes if anyone’s interested.

I’m a professor of game design at Montreal’s Concordia University and I have a small research project on game conversations. The general research question concerns how we can make dialogue with fictional game characters more interesting, giving more space for player creativity than menu-based systems.

From a more technical standpoint, the approach has been: can we make a fun conversational game on the basis of chatbot technology. And for that I’ve been using Chatscript.

You can read more about the LabLabLab project here: http://www.lablablab.net/

We have two bots you can try.

Our first experiment was “A Tough Sell”, in which you need to convince Snow White to eat the poisoned apple: http://www.lablablab.net/en/games/a-tough-sell/

Our second was SimProphet: http://www.lablablab.net/en/games/sim-prophet/

Both got decent reviews and feedback from gaming communities.

We’re currently working on a 3rd one: SimHamlet.

There’s a brief communication on the project here: http://www.lablablab.net/en/pulbications/

This is a Twitter feed where I post news and funny player-bot exchanges: https://twitter.com/lelablablab

All feedback welcome!

best,

Jonathan

Interesting. It looks like a keyword-based approach can work as long as the players’ role is clearly defined and they know more or less what they are expected to say. I’ll share this with some of my acquainted artists who develop interactive Visual Novels (By your game’s layout I take it you’ve heard of Visual novels, otherwise, might be interesting to check out).

My own approach (2003) was more free-form in that I had created a small RPG world where everyone and everything had names, and all NPC’s were tied into the central information system, allowing the player to ask any character about who they were, whether they knew where person X was, which building or town the player was currently in, etc. The grander idea was to also tie it into a central storyline, where every character’s actions were recorded and could be ‘reported’ to the player if they asked about what was going on with character X or in town Y, like news travelling around. I never really got around to it though.

Hi Don,

What you describe is more or less where I’m heading next: conversational characters acting as a window to a more dynamically simulated world.

And yes, our approach works in a restricted domain and a goal-oriented conversation!