McMahan Game Cultures Final 6/15/16, 10:58 AM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE AT THE WATERSHED MEDIA CENTRE GAMECULTURES BRISTOL 29/30th June & 1st July 2001 THE ROLE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN INTERACTIVE FICTION: THE CASE OF THE SIMS Alison McMahan, Ph.D. A division has appeared recently in writing about computer games, a division between scholars who favor narratological tools for analyzing interactive media, especially interactive fiction, and those who prefer to apply game theory. In the eighties academic discussions of interactive fiction focused on hypertext, and to a lesser extent, hypermedias. The emphasis on hypertext led to an emphasis on multiform plot structure as the basis for interactive fiction. For a while – a decade or so – this was a productive approach. Some of the most popular computer games, such as Myst and its sequel, Riven, are graphic hypertexts. Structurally similar games such as Blade Runner, Star Trek Borg, Blair Witch I through IV, used the same remediation approach as Myst and Riven: the idea in these games is to present the user/ player with a multiform plot version of a literary or cinematic text and encourage the user to have not only a point of view on the game but a “point of action” – in other words, to play a part in the story. For someone like me, who as a kid always wanted to jump out of the little boat wending its way through Disneyland’s ride The Pirates of the Caribbean and carouse with the pirates, this approach was perfect. Like most of Disneyland’s rides, these computer games exploit a franchise that already exists in another medium, usually cinema or television. This development was so successful that the cinema and television in turn began to incorporate computer game aesthetics. This might take the form of films imitating the look and level design of games (see for example Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element), or a linear presentation of the multiform structures that are experiences through gameplay in films like Run Lola Run, 12 Monkeys, eXistenZ, and Dead Again, to name just a few. But the very fact that cinema began to remediate (to use the term in the sense that Bolter and Page 1 of 11 McMahan Game Cultures Final 6/15/16, 10:58 AM Grusin do) computer game aesthetics lent more force to a different, some say an opposite, approach to interactive fiction design. This is the game theory or ludology approach, an approach that focuses on the kinds of computer games willfully ignored by they hypertext or narratological theorists, the games that remediate not movies or TV shows, but board games, card games, and games of chance. I would include first person shooters and most simulations in this category, first person shooters because they remediate survivalist type games and simulations because they remediate human systems which are based on rules, even if no way to win or lose the game has been specifically defined. What has struck me lately about the division between the narratologists – which is what the hypertext people really are – and the ludologists is that the division between the two approaches has moved from being a fruitful discussion to almost acrimonious. The first sign of this acrimony is the revulsion many designers and seasoned players feel when the word “narrative” is applied to their latest or favorite game. For example, when I approached an interactive media designer for an interview and told him I was writing a narratology of computer games, he indicated that we had very little to talk about because his work, according to him, is not narrative. I pointed out that our disagreement lay not in how we each perceived his work, but in what we understood narrative to be. That got me my interview, but his anti-narrative stance remained firm. By the same token, longtime practitioners of the hypertext theory have two responses to the application of game theory to interactive fiction: one is to say that the hypertext approach covers all the bases addressed by game theory analysis; in other words, the ludologists are re-inventing the wheel. I have to side with the ludologists on this one, as I believe that much of the narratological approach only works because narratologists limit themselves to certain kinds of games: role-playing games (RPGs) and games that are essentially multiform plots with a few puzzles thrown in. In other words, games that can be analyzed as graphic hypertexts. This response clearly seems motivated less by critical factors than by a desire to one, not cede the field to those game theorists, and two, not to have to learn game theory, which surely must involve some kind of math…. A corollary response to game theory from narratologists has been to claim that hypertexts are also games. This latter approach could be interpreted as conciliatory and hopefully will lead to further exchange between narratologists and ludologists, but so far this hasn’t happened. The ludologists, filled with the heady power of having discovered a productive approach, are busy getting on with their work, and are unwilling to work with hypertext people. And why should they? The narratologists limited Page 2 of 11 McMahan Game Cultures Final 6/15/16, 10:58 AM themselves willingly to hypertext-like games, such as most of the games based on movies, games which the ludologists don’t even think are worthy of the name. At the same time the narratologists willfully neglected the games the ludologists know for a fact are really interesting: games like Tetris, any first person shooter, and simulations. This gleeful rejection of the narratological approach seems to be especially pronounced in ludologists who used to be narratologists…. The idea I’d like to get across in my talk today is that as long as this division continues both groups are likely to miss the point. We are in danger of getting so focused on our respective approaches that the true nature of our object of study will continue to elude us. By our true object of study I mean what I have been calling interactive fiction and non-fiction, that is, all types of computer games, on-line games, MUDS and MOOs, and interactive television. The danger of becoming blind to our object of study is the same even if we use both approaches, but apply them separately. I don’t claim to have any special insight into the true nature of interactive fiction, but I do have some ideas about where we, academics engaged in the study of interactive fiction, should go from here. Rather than focus on what is different in these two polarized approaches, and rather than having each camp defend their approach by focusing exclusively on one type of computer game over another, I would like to focus on what both types of computer games have in common. I was started on this train of thought by the annoying fact that industry genre categories – Adventure, RPG, simulation, strategy, puzzle, sport, etc, etc, -- are so inadequate for the task they are meant to fulfill. Even the industry has come to recognize this recently and their solution is to label games with two or even more genre labels – “sport/simulation” for example, or “adventure/rpg”. Clearly a new system for describing genres of computer games is needed. I once proposed a system based not on game mis-en-scene elements – which is what the current system is based on – but on game narrative structures. I realized how imperfect the system was even before the essay made it into print. I then tried to use a reception study approach and create a genre system based on how the player’s position is built into the game. This IS a useful approach and I am still pursuing it – if any of you are going to Console-ing passions you can hear me apply this classification system to interactive television in a paper I will give there. But a reception studies approach still doesn’t solve the essential problem of creating a genre system based on the texts themselves. Such a genre system would clearly have to take the type and degree of interactivity of each genre into consideration. But “interactivity” is too vague of a concept, so it can’t be the only, or even the main defining factor. Page 3 of 11 McMahan Game Cultures Final 6/15/16, 10:58 AM The approach I am working on now is based on an assumption that all games have some sort of artificial intelligence (AI) as an integral part of their structure, and than an analysis of the AI of markedly different games can lead us to greater insight into the nature of games in particular and interactive fiction in general. Furthermore, I believe that both hypertext theorists and ludologists need to take AI into consideration, so the study of AI can be a discursive bridge where the two approaches can meet. The problem with this approach is that, to be done properly, it requires some knowledge of programming, and that’s knowledge that I don’t have, yet. So for the preliminary analysis that I have relied upon descriptions of AI in different games provided by the game designers themselves, either directly to me or in the press. Until recently, when someone said “artificial intelligence” to me my first mental association was with HAL, the computer of 2001. I guess after this summer most people will associate AI with the Pinnochio character in Steven Spielberg’s film. In other words, when we think of AI, the first thing we think of is robots that simulate human beings in voice and often appearance.