XNA Diaries : Games

XNA Extras and Beta2

garykac — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:11:00 GMT

This is a heads-up that the current release of XNA Extras requires some changes before it will work with the newly released XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2.

I'm hoping to find some time later this week (yes, I know it's already late in the week) and get an updated version up this weekend. Sorry about the delay!

Mixing Natural Language into Games

garykac — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 08:01:00 GMT

[I had intended to write up a small post about my project earlier, but didn't get the chance until now. Hopefully, you'll find it at least part of it interesting. -Gary]

Being in the Natural Language Processing group here in Microsoft Research, and being someone who enjoys creating and playing games, one of my interests is to explore the intersection between these two areas.

I started by experimenting with attaching semantic annotations to virtual photographs - photos taken by the player within the virtual world. The player could take a photograph and then bring the photo to an NPC in the world and have a (somewhat stunted) "conversation" about the contents of the photo. A key aspect of this work is that all of the interactions are dynamically generated during runtime - there is no scripted dialog. A basic description and overview of this work is given in "Multi-Modal Question-Answering: Questions without Keyboards" [IJCNLP 2005].

One of the problems that I encountered with this project was the high cost of creating 3D assets (where's the Content Pipeline when you need it?), so I converted to a more conventional tile-based isometric role-playing game. I still needed to create art assets, but found that it was much easier to create 2D sprites than to create models, textures and the other bits required for a decent-looking 3D world. This allowed me to focus less time on the art (which is fun, but not the key point of the game) and more on the dialog and NPC-interaction aspects of the game.

Here is a screenshot from a game demo (called "PotionMaster") showing some of the dynamically generated dialog elements (apologies for the "programmer art" ^_^):

More details about this game are given in "Using Natural Language to Manage NPC Dialog" [AIIDE 2006] and (in an earlier form) in "Question-Answering in Role-Playing Games" [AAAI 2005].

Unfortunately, I cannot release this game in its complete form. It relies on some internal-only NLP tools during runtime (to dynamically generate the NPC responses from the abstract semantic representations), and those components cannot be released (not even in binary form).

To work around this limitation, I've defined an interface between the core game engine and our dialog engine. This way I can release the game engine and keep our proprietary dialog system in-house. There may seem like no point in releasing only half of a game, but the purpose is so that other NL researchers can plug-in their own dialog systems and run situated evaluations without having to create an entire game from scratch. I've also created a very simple scripted dialog plug-in that takes the place of our internal backend (so the game will be playable).

So, that's the project in a nutshell. When XNA was released, I expanded the scope slightly so that the game code could be used as a tutorial for creating isometric games. The XNAExtras that you've seen so far are the first of these releases.

[Update: All of my papers (including those mentioned above) are listed on my research homepage.]

Personality tests and cultural sensitivity in games

garykac — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:32:00 GMT

or "Why don't Pokémon fart in the US?"

If you have children of "Pokémon age", then you're probably aware of the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon (PMD) game coming up for the Nintendo DS & GBA. One clever aspect of this game is that you take a personality test to determine which Pokémon you will become in the game. Personality tests like this are widespread - most popular TV shows have at least one quiz available online to determine which character in the show is most similar to your "real" personality. I don't know if this is the first use of a personality test for character generation in a game (I kinda doubt it), but it's the first one that I'm familiar with.

A flash demo of the PMD personality test is at the above site. In it you are asked 8 questions (randomly chosen from a list of over 60) like "A test is coming up. How do you study for it?" or "A human hand extends out of a toilet! What would you do?". Your answers determine if you are Impish, Quiky, Timid, Hasty, and so on, which in turn determines which Pokémon you become.

However, there was one question/answer pair that seemed odd:

You broke a rotten egg in a room. What will you do?

You have two options for answering:

Open a window right away.
Take a sniff first.

Now, why would you "take a sniff first" if you broke a rotten egg? A look at the questions from the Japanese version of the test shows that this question was changed from the original.

へやで　オナラ　しちゃった…… あなたは　どうする？
Heya de onara shichatta...... Anata wa dou suru?
You farted in a room... What do you do?

Now the "take a sniff first" option makes sense. ^_^

I like the idea of taking a personality test to determine your character's attributes in a game. It's much more subtle then asking the player directly if they want to play a brave fighter or a sneaky thief. For my game (which is an RPG), I've been toying around with the idea of having the player compose a personal ad for themselves, or a wanted ad for their ideal soulmate, or perhaps casting a horoscope for them as part of a character creation process. That probably won't happen anytime soon, but it's nice to dream...

But what's also interesting with the PMD example is the cultural issue of why Nintendo felt the need to change the question from the original Japanese version. The other questions in the personality test stayed basically the same. The original Japanese "Do you long for a life of drinking tea on the veranda?" became "Do you dream of lounging around idly without much excitement?", but most of the others were practically literal translations.

So, why aren't kids (or Pokémon) allowed to fart in the US? Is this what the world has come to?