Well I probably missed my window to post an actual AIIDE postmortem – I don’t think I really had anything that original to say that hasn’t been said here or elsewhere already.
I will say, however, I was pretty surprised by the emphasis (was it an entire day?) on planning techniques for interactive stories.
It’s an interesting thought, and I have no doubt that part of the reason there are so many people working on it is that there are few clearer uses for planning in this field (dare I say that planning is yet another AI technology in search of an application? For games, I mean.) Jeff, of course, has made fruitful – and nonobvious – use of it in FEAR, which I think has a lot of us really excited.
I’m much more skeptical of the thought of applying planning to story-tellling. As I see it, there are two major production hurdles preventing this, commercially speaking. The first is – and I don’t think this is nothing – that design would rather die than allow the story to be taken out of its hands (for any game that is story-driven, that is, which I would venture to say, something like Halo IS). So, okay, we’re probably not talking about making a mainstream commercial game around this thing – in fact, we probably have to resign ourselves to the fact that the kind of story that will come out of this technology will be a pretty loose sort of story – not the tight, energetic narrative of Bruckheimer, but the loose, perhaps rambling, slower-paced, more circuitous narrative of, say, Malick. So okay … we’re not talking commercially mainstream.
But that doesn’t get us around the second production problem, which I think cuts more to the heart of the matter: most planning-in-story-telling approaches are about finding a path through a complicated scene-space, a space, in fact so complicated that a greedy (say, an FSM) or scripted approach just becomes too difficult to author. But I don’t think we’ve seen any such scene space in a game yet (commercial or otherwise), and creating such a space has the potential to be mind-bogglingly expensive (speaking of the content explosion).
I remember hearing Hal Barwood at some talk or another express regret (or it sounded like regret anyway) at the decision to provide three major story branches for “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis” – early in the game, the player is asked to choose between the “brains”, “brawn” and “teamwork” paths, each of which provided an almost completely distinct sequence of puzzles and story events that only reconverged at the very end. It was, almost literally, three games in one. Totally not worth it, claimed Mr. Barwood, because most players went down one path and stopped playing, making the production-cost-per-minute-of-play for the average player astronomically high. This is precisely the reason we avoid branching storylines in our games – why divide your production energy between two branches when you could cut one and the other twice as good? Especially when no player will miss the one you cut!
Now that’s just talking about branching – imagine the horrible production-cost-per-minute-of-play of a single path through a story SPACE. Can we expect to see more than 10% of everything that was authored in a single play-through? And if we DO see more than 10%, I maintain, using planning is overkill! Quite the Catch-22, eh?
My skepticism notwishtanding, I hope that I’m proven wrong. I give credit to the Façade guys, because it’s clear that they’re quite aware of this problem with their own work. The smart thing they do, of course, is to tackle it on a design level as well as a technical/pipeline level. Their experience is only 15 minutes long, so you can almost be GARANTEED that a player will play it multiple times, since the commitment threshold is so low (of course you still need to make sure that your story-space is sufficiently fleshed out that a radically different experience could POTENTIALLY be had on a second playing – otherwise why will the player be encouraged to play a third time?) On the content creation side, I’m eager to see what progress they make in creating an efficient pipeline to shovel content into their engine. If the threshold for creating this content goes down, I guess the whole approach becomes practical. But unless we’re talking about text-based interactive drama experience, I don’t think we’re there yet.