Mailbag: AI Research on Dialogue and Story Generation (Part 3)

Posted on by Emily Short
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This is a continuation of an earlier mailbag answer about AI research that touches on dialogue and story generation. As before, I’m picking a few points of interest, summarizing highlights, and then linking through to the detailed research.

This one is about a couple of areas of natural language processing and generation, as well as sentiment understanding, relevant to how we might realize stories and dialogue with particular surface features and characteristics.

Transferring text style

Screen Shot 2018-08-25 at 2.27.27 PM.png

Style transfer is familiar in image manipulation, and there are loads of consumer-facing applications and websites that let you make style changes to your own photographs. Textual style transfer is a more challenging problem. How might you express the same information, but in different wording, representing a different authorial manner? Alter the sentiment of the text to make it more positive or negative? Translate complex language to something more basic, or vice versa? Capture the distinctive prose characteristics of a well-known author or a specific era? Indeed, looked at the right way, translation from one human language into another can be regarded as a form of style transfer.

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IF Comp Post-Mortems

Posted on by Mort Short
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Now that some time has elapsed since 2018 IF Comp has closed, a number of authors have followed up with post-mortems (and in some cases, there have also been a few game updates based on player feedback).

This is a tradition that has grown up over the past couple of years, and one that I really like: these posts in aggregate represent a pretty broad picture of the thinking around IF design and development at the moment, and one often hears from authors who don’t otherwise blog about their craft.

IF Comp saw a high number of entries, and there’s a lot to look at in the post–mortems.  In fact, there’s more than I personally could track, but with the help of my new blog assistant (“Mort”), we’ve done a little curation on posts to call out some interesting content and sort them by subject covered.

Just as a reminder, these all link to posts that are riddled with spoilers, so consider this your warning on that score.

Presentation & User Experience – These post-mortems shed particular light on questions regarding user interface, design, and what the game would be like for the player.

Instruction Set (Jared Jackson). Jared wrote his entry with Scratch, which is fairly extraordinary given how very much Scratch is not a language designed for text presentation. The post-mortem explains a bit about why he took that approach, and what he learned from coming into IF Comp from a non-traditional direction using a different set of tools.

Abbess Otilia’s Life and Death (Arno von Borries). This piece invested heavily in presenting something that looked like a medieval manuscript, but that raised challenges and some players complained about readability. The post-mortem looks at the implementation challenges and trade-offs between readability and historical accuracy.

showimage.pngBogeyman (Elizabeth Smyth) “The nature of those weekly life-or-death decisions remains at the core of the game. It’s the only choice you really get to make: good vs “good”; conscience vs authority; defiance vs submission; integrity vs survival. Almost every major choice is designed around that conflict.”

The 2018 runner-up Bogeyman has a wonderfully detailed post-mortem that delves into concept, design, character, and the Bogeyman himself.  In the end, though, these elements were created in service to the choices in front of the player/character, as Elizabeth Smyth produced a game straightforward in its design, but emotionally resonant for those who experienced it.

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Cragne Manor

Posted on by Emily Short
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cragneCragne Manor is now available!

Considering the number of authors on this game, it feels possible that every person who is interested in parser-based interactive fiction is already part of this project. But I know there are a few exceptions, so for those who aren’t already familiar:

Cragne Manor was organized by Ryan Veeder and Jenni Polodna as a 20-years-later tribute to Michael Gentry’s classic 1998 Lovecraftian horror game Anchorhead. They put out an open call to the IF community for authors to write one room each — without being able to see each other’s work — and they themselves would stitch the results together.

I think it’s fair to say this succeeded more thoroughly than they anticipated. More than 80 authors created rooms for Cragne Manor — some of them small, atmospheric rooms like mine; others packed with story or constituting ingenious set-piece puzzles; still others brief and elegant vignettes. There are some individual author contributions in Cragne that would make respectable IF Comp entries in their own right. Not only that, but Ryan and Jenni did an epic amount of work, with great ingenuity, to come up with a puzzle structure that would make all of those disparate pieces contribute to a functional, enjoyable gameplay flow.

I haven’t finished it — a reflection partly of my supply of free time, but also the fact that this game is huge. But I can tell you already that if you like parser IF, you want to play this. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes disgusting, sometimes funny, sometimes weird, and sometimes all of those at once — but I’ll let you find the horse for yourself. And somehow all that surreal adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts.

Thanks, Ryan and Jenni. This was really, really fun.

Counterfeit Monkey (Release 8)

Posted on by Mort Short
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Cover.pngCounterfeit Monkey is now being maintained as an open source, community project, with Petter Sjölund spearheading the effort. Thanks to Petter and the rest of the team, it has just had its latest update with Release 8, available here.  This version fixes various bugs discovered since the last release, which came out about a year ago.  Thanks to Damien Neil, Dan Brown, Ian Kelly, Lauren Brazier, and Michael Gundlach for reporting bugs!  And special thanks to Dannii Willis and Andrew Plotkin.

There’s a link to the complete change log for those who are curious, but a quick summary is below.

Among the most important changes:

  • Fixes a hang that would occur on some interpreters when resizing the game window or clicking on the compass rose while being asked to reply yes or no.
  • Fixes a bug where the game would use the achievements from the save file rather than the external monkeyac file after restoring, This meant that a save game from a different session, such as from another interpreter or computer, would award you the achievements from that session. Achievements are now properly reloaded from the monkeyac file after a restore.
  • Works around a bug where the player could get stuck after showing the pass to the secretary.
  • No longer awards achievements upon dying that were meant to be awarded when finishing the game.
  • Makes all player input case-insensitive.
  • Fixes a bug where restoring a save game from an interpreter without support for graphics would break the map display on an interpreter which supports graphics.
  • Adds a massive pug.

 

Counterfeit Monkey is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.

Save the Cat (Blake Snyder)

Posted on by Emily Short
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savecat

Save the Cat is one of those screenwriting books, like Robert McKee’s Story, that you can’t help running into if you’re looking at writing advice at all. The title refers to the idea that you must establish your protagonist in a movie with some sympathetic action. There are a lot of musts in this book. Snyder is telling you specifically how to write a three-act, 110-page movie script that fits a Hollywood formula of a few years back — down to which pages of the script should feature major events and reversals; how many beats should appear within each act; and how the hero should be feeling at the midpoint of the movie.

He explains that the heroes ought to be in their 20s at the latest because Men Under 25 are the most coveted viewing demographic. He does not overtly say they should be white, but that assumption is I think implicit. The book is a few years old; after Black Panther and Get Out and Crazy Rich Asians and so on, perhaps Snyder would now have something different to say about representation.

In any case, the book is largely about formula — and a formula much more genre-bound than my nemesis The Hero’s Journey. Snyder has very little to say about theme, other than to acknowledge that you probably should have one and mention it early in your screenplay. He has not much to say, either, about developing characters or about representing personal truths. He doesn’t very much care what the substance of your work might be. This book is about how to package it, how to make it accessible to audiences in a format that is familiar to them and that will help them quickly understand the emotional landscape.

So if this is mainly formula for a different medium and different market from games, does it have anything to offer?

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End of November Link Assortment

Posted on by Emily Short
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December 1 is the next SF Bay IF Meetup.

December 2 will be the next Seattle area IF Meetup, at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma.

December 5 is the next date for the upcoming Boston IF Meetup, discussing IFComp winner Alias: The Magpie.

December 5-8 in Dublin is the next ICIDS, an academic conference on interactive digital storytelling. (I have enjoyed this in the past, though it’s been a few years since I’ve been able to attend.)

December 15 will be the next Baltimore/DC IF Meetup, discussing IFComp winner Alias: The Magpie from 3-5 at Mad City Coffee.

December 15 is the submission deadline for SubQ’s Game Jam, for very short pieces that focus on the theme of love.

The Oxford/London IF Meetup does not meet in December, to give everyone a holiday break.

 

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