Chatbot Game Manifesto: Golden Rules for Making a New Kind of Game

[Music] everybody my name is americano I'm a freelance game designer I've been working on several games such as on desk Legion and even zero I'm a so innovative design teacher in a video game score and today we are going to speak about even zero and a more generic way about childhood games so just the first question to start who in this room knows a bit about the game or even has played it can raise your hand okay some people cool so to everyone to be at the same page we're just going to start with the teaser of the game and we talked a bit about the comparator do you dream of distant planets stars and galaxies are you ready for the most transformative experience of your life [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] so this game is even zero it's a game

where you play an astronaut lost in an empty space ship all the crew has disappeared and you have to convince the main computer of the ship to bring you back to earth the thing is the main gameplay is untie pig text you can ask anything you want to the computer and the computer can give value depending on your relationship so yeah it's a chat game and childhood games are very neutral there are only a few of them that exist in a wall you can basically consume with the fingers of one hand here are three of the I guess most popular Shepard games that I know the first one is a patent click which was written by Douglas Adam inside 90s facade is probably the most famous Chabad game and it's very interesting and we speak a bit about it later and

this torque the subtable game here is a flash game that you can find for freelance internet and which has very similar things to even zero I like to classify games this way you have first the good old system games like Super Mario and this game basically walk like that you push a button your Hobbit performs an action and this action has impact on the game system and all of this is constant direction will always be the same and the impact will be always be the same and then you have symmetric games and semantic games don't work because of a combination of gales of your game system it does not work because of that but the same mental games are based on huge database which have been written by designers and if we take for example scribble notes scribbled note is a game

when you can type walls and this was appear in your game little for example if you type plain there will be playing in Oroville and the player will be able to interact with this plain as with real plain and the system is not able to understand what a plane is and to generate it it has to be based on the database when a game designer had to explain what a plane was chat with games are semantic games so just subcategory of it and a semantic games that depends mostly under database and it's important to understand that chat board games are not text adventure games you know the this kind of games that were very popular in the 80s in such games like so for example two player has type an action and a target to progress into adventure for example

you can type and or and it will probably open the door and the challenge here is to guess what is a good action and a good target so basically there are kind of videos but shadow games focus more on the natural language part in childhood games you have to talk in plain English to character and roleplay so for me the excellent ideas works on a more rational part of your brain when childhood games walk with a more emotional part of a brain so now that all of that has been stated what I suggest is with the stork giving you some cues to make your own childhood game at first we have to start with basics when you want to walk on a childhood game as every other kind of

game you have to define what is your game experience and it's important understand that [Music] experience of childhood games is basically narrative childhood games are narrative games story driven games and you have to understand that too white if actually your chatbot chatbots characters like any other character like in any other kind of fiction and you have to ask yourself some questions like what is job Chadwick motivations who made it can here she sings express love excit Susie how does it change through the career what relationships can supply your build with it and more importantly what do your childhood know and what does not know basically if you can define this it will be much easier for you to write for childhood not a needle

because you will be able to have better lines and videos to react but just because you won't fall in the trap of the sentient AI and you will be able to accept as a writer that your childhood doesn't know anything and there are reasons for that and the player will be able to understand that and won't have problem with that this was a narrative part but of course sad words are systems and we have to build working system for which supports your writing and generally today we all use chat boards basically or at least we know we know them because we we have our smartphones with their assistants like three there is no cotton on Windows and these chat boots are very efficient but they use very complex systems like neural networks machine learnings and all these

kind of things but the problem with that is the systems are basically black boxes they work with an input and an pet but you cannot read I've into them and Twitter details you know that as game designers of kind of control freak we like to be able to master everything in the experience and it's very important on a narrative game so my advice here is just make a simpler system the deterministic system that you will be able to white for and to debug to fully understand and your childhood won't be efficient because of its code but because of its writing because as I was telling you yes the database is a most important part of it and for example what you see in this slide is the first version of vision zero even zero start as a paper prototype and the first plate test of the game whereas a

game of hockey missing I was a game and I sitting at a table and basically winning a gingy session we were explaining the player ok this context young spaceships there is a computer in front of you what do you type and then we are giving them a paper and hide - I'd done the query and with us we had a flow chart with the AI and we are following this flow chart and without cheating we were generating a non-square for this player and we perform this kind of pay test dozens at does enough time and we discover how to on their questions or inserts and at the end we had the much more efficient for the chart we came to a programmer team and say ok this is our I implemented as you want but it has to work this out like this finally in Dutton's that is that we figure out that our players were kind of shy when they were writing things in front of us so we made a fake even the roots really see

now that we put on a computer and we let the players play alone in a room we are telling them ok this is a wheel AR be careful but the truth is second I were in another room as a players were connected and this way we discover many new inserts standard so all of this is very theoretical so let's start with a concrete example on how it works this is a play through from jacksepticeye is a famous youtuber playing even zero and we are going to watch the first scene of the game it's coming longer and I comment it later the d2 is 33 how do I go out open corridor d3 fine I'll do it here then open corridor d3 getting sassy with me sorry

oh god you heard Toby I aren't you Oh okay so this is a very usual reaction and behavior from a player being given zero like I think 80% of the pleasures of even zero start the game will exist giving others like in the text adventure game and our goal as chatbot makers is to change the mind and make them think with the emotional part of the brain and in start by making them treat the chat bot as a sensible thing so what we see in this video is jacksepticeye keeps asking to some other opens door opens

the door and AI is able to count that and is able to realize that the player isn't yet treating it as a sensible thing so this thing has just one pupils so dough won't open as long as the pair will give just simple orders if the player ask please it's a polite 12 and it's the first step so slow we open use a player inserts it so first step because top enjoyment you insert someone it means that you consider it has field yet mean but it's still fine and what we see here is that after several others the AI give a cues and say ok you know you just keep repeating all those let's change let's move on and the activity tired and swells stop stop getting sassy with me and this is fine because starting this moment Jeff city guy has accepted to have a real conversation

with the eye so to do opens and jacksepticeye freaks out of course this is not easy this is what we basically called world play like the player has to play as it's habit are and we Mandela player had during a play test was keeping giving orders and to the AI and after a moment it was blinking minutes like that we need we haven't we this system yet i I can't women told him okay you know you can have a real conversation just trying you look at me and say well I know but I don't want to feel stupid in front of you and the thing is it can be very intimate to perform wordplay and to try to be emotionally involved this game especially because players are not

really used to do this like that to have to put their own words generally they just have to pick some direct written dialogues and other the game is I know you have to help them to give them the tools to do it easily and one of the first thing is to let them define the avatar gives them some law some explanation about the contact so they don't feel naked in your game but at the end not all players will like your game and we had this problem with even zero we saw that because the game was very simple you know you didn't need any obscure gaming creature or some super firm to master gamepad you just needed to type text and magic everybody does that today we thought that everybody would love the game but the truth is as any other kind of game you

have a diet you have a market and you have to aim at these people but you won't even be able to kill everybody so and fill yourself with that so I keep repeating that but the writing for chatbot is the most important part it's more important and the technical aspect and writing is not easy and that like the writing of other kind of games first there is a lot of writing and what is kind of frustrating is that only 1% of the player I mean piers sorry players will see one doesn't of right but a Z on every player's will see the whole things you have written so you you have to accept that you're waiting for only a few of them and at the same

time you have to anticipating any kind of queries but of course you cannot do that you cannot guess every crazy player will be able to say and fortunately we figure out some tricks to not failed without chat but I guess there are two golden rules with writing for chat but the first thing is you know okay but most of the time Walter Stern the player but never after exam don't tell them when you failed to understand in everyone's way I don't understand can you repeat the query but right evasive outputs elsewhere with open questions think like horoscopes you know and we even had smart trick it was to pick one wall we had understood from the query and formulate an aswear which was using that one so for example if the

player asked there is a character in the story even zero who is a curtain ND and exactly I asked what is the favorite kind of music of nandi and AI fails to understand that it will detect nandi it will detect that there is a question mark and it will ask you something like you know none this privacy is very important to me stop about asking question but her and for the player the player won't feel like the AI isn't knocking them but more like the AI is hiding something to them and it's not really like who's he suspicious and that was that prolific to you the single golden rule is when you understand your play because it happens sometime tell them and be very specific about that you what you understood for example sometimes in even zero there seems that where the AI doesn't want to open the door have you seen if you is appear ask open

the door please and you want swear well I don't know this elsewhere could fit with anything else and the player will be like my not even sure the a I understood but if you want swam I don't know if I can open the door to you this works much better and it lets you play goes on moves on and something else so yeah anticipate and make magic but you have to be very careful with one thing you have one club to avoid absolutely it's a chatbot club the moment when your child would start repeating itself because at this moment the player breaks especially disbelief and realize they're playing just a video game I'm not talking to a real character and

there are different ways to avoid that the first obvious way is to write a lot and what you see for example on this slide is 20 unsquare just for the question why why question mark in any context even zero has been chance where and this is a truth for what question mark question mark etc but of course you cannot write you cannot write an internal text so one other thing we didn't even zero was building a system which was able to be a part of a sentence and mix it with that of another sentence and this way we were able to generate two millions of lines so it was very effective of course if you would play the game for hours you will be able to figure out some patterns but it works pretty well another thing we did was you know generally the chat group happens when

player asked the same question over and over and like like you know kids basically and we met system able to count the amount of time question has been asked and then we had special warnings like oops we are going to fall in loop we have to do something and the way I was saying things like you know it's been six times who has the same question come on gun sales something else and the pair were like why was it so smart but I want to be crystal clear with you you're AI will never be perfect and you have to embrace it you have to accept that you cannot reach perfection so stop making in fact that it's better to make a narrative where you a I fail is fitting what we had in even zo was basically the AI is part of an old spaceship and this

spaceship is broken as business has been lost in space for 30 years the AI was gonna be crazy and the ugly cheese on the screen the screen look like 80s technology you know so when there is a bug please feel like oh this ship is so broken but if you take a game like facade you can I was talking at the beginning which involves this time to humans the chatbots plays a role of two elements when the chapel begs you basic see humans bugging no and he's very unnatural is like an kini and these breaks the emotions so because the flaws don't fit with the narrative let's speak a bit about the pipeline since you will have a lot of writing you need to have a strong pipeline and the first thing that comes is the tools and this for example

screenshot for the first tool we made for 18-0 an important thing to know is that tools shape your AI and this is true for any kind of the game you know when you make a tool it shape your design it shape your content and if it shapes it a way you didn't intend to go to gonna be kind of difficult to make the game you want so make sure to allow you to write a lot of text to edit it to search new database to make easy iterations make sure your tools blue translators to make the localization right and make sure to allow you to do young AI because we saw a big part a good job and another thing which is a kind of important is playtest of course again play tests are important in any kind of games but for even 0 and

childhood games in generic way we had to anticipate what the player will say so all the pollution was turning around the play test every weekend we had the play test and during the week the team was implementing the new walls by reading the logs from the players and we did that for month and months and months but as I produced now don't fall in this trap don't aim for perfection you you want which perfection so you have to tell yourself stop you have to be able to freeze content you have to be able to accept that you won't play test a scene because there will always be awards to add to your database and you you have to figure out when it's really when you you can accept the state of the camera last thing on your pipeline is

requisition and as you can guess it's true for narrative games in generic way some games are very hard to to localize because a big amount of text but it's especially true for Chaput games because the system of the child but depends also on the language language is work very differently and we had this problem with even zero half of the game has been found by the French government and it comes with one condition translate the game in French but we are like we will do that at the end and we finally achieve to release the game in French and God is terrible just don't play it in French and I'm very sorry just if I'm not this way to all the French people who play the game it just do not rock and the thing is if you

want to make Chabot games you can look at a them that you have before starting again you have to ask yourself in what language your game will be and prepare you to prepare your system to fit with these languages because when difficult thing is waiting for Shabbat is very technical and if you want to work for example with translators with the localization company they will need to access your tools they will need to understand the system this is gonna be difficult we had some males at the reserve even zero from Chinese companies for example of Japanese companies they wanted to translate even zero in Chinese or in Japanese and everytime we answered with yeah fine just you know we won't touch a line of code so do as you want and keep as much money as you want on for the sales but we won't touch that and say

okay just show us how it works and we are showing them and we will never get any one swear because then you how difficult it will be okay now I guess have given you any hints to start you on childhood games and I really want you to match other games because anthem has a strong potential I'm very happy to see that this year at IGF there is a childhood game don't make love that you can play it's on the exposition part a last thing that I want to tell you is that don't wish when you to keep on you know you can make Chabot games that don't evolve tapping basically chat but it just conversation you know is just bonding with an NPC just having an made an unique relationship that other players won't have because they didn't communicate the way you did and for

example this game like captain blue decision for example our two games that are childhood games definitely they don't work with keyboards you have to select symbols from an alien language and use them to from sentences and translate the runs well the last one is an interactive fiction book at home but you interact with the device in natural language and if kind of a weak chat but perhaps it could be a child jam and you can imagine any kind of game like for example games well communicate with gestures for examples of loud gladion it's not a bad game of course but it's perhaps a sport step to this kind of of camel so yeah just it's a bit cliche to say that think outside the box and do your best with chat but ok I would like to thanks again Mahal is just here

he was also give another game and I hope you know that we told if you have any question I'd be glad to Australia's and on has something to do with torque but after the presentation you can reach me and we could speak on millions I'm part of the first French video game unions in France and the only thing to say on this topic so feel free to ask me your questions thank you very much I share Benz from Microsoft you mentioned neural networks being kind of frustrating me because they're a black box and not easy to tweak so I'm curious what you did for processing input do you guys still try to do some kind of natural language processing or how do you identify the users in tents etc so for posting inputs we built a database based on tags basically like

every world with a similar meaning I have a common tag for example murder key extrema has the tag death and when the player type something we just check out which tags are in this query and the AI has unsquare patterns that are sort with the different tags that the player can type and generate as well this way yeah thank you [Music] yeah sorry I'm out of time so we can go to the web group to finish your question after player thank you