The Game Design Round Table #308 Narrative AI with Emily Short
Jan 16, 2024
Emily Short, legendary interactive fiction writer and creative director of Failbetter Games, discusses modeling relationships in games, player psychology and information sharing, and the use of game AI in non-combat experiences.
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Episode notes
Model NPCs Around Memory And Mood
- Emily Short focused on NPCs' continuous memory, mood, and conversation tracking rather than combat or pathfinding AI.
- She built systems that model emotional state and history to make characters feel more independent and coherent.
Building Versu To Model Social Practices
- Emily described collaborating with Richard Evans to build Versu, an AI platform modeling social practices rather than spaces and objects.
- Versu produced iPad stories and Blood and Laurels, a Roman intrigue game emphasizing social choices and loyalties.
Why LLMs Tend To Be Predictable
- Large language models optimize for the most probable next token, which makes their outputs obvious and often uninteresting for entertainment.
- That training objective explains why vanilla GPT-style outputs feel generic and not narratively surprising.