Author: Salvador Jesús Romero Castellano

This is Part Three of an ongoing series of post describing the design of Turing Adventure. You can try the game here.

• Part One: Motivation: Feel the adventure
• Part Two: How to push the adventure feeling further
• Part Three: Turing Adventure: Overview and design choices
• Part Four: AIML: The technology behind Turing Adventure
• Part Five: The psychology of human-chatbots interactions
• Part Six: Technical and design difficulties

Turing Adveture is a ten minutes long point and click adventure in which I tried to address the issues exposed above. We developed it for the Adventure Jam, in two weeks, so the game is short.

I propose a Universe in which there is a robot planet, called Turing Planet, inhabited by a mysterious race of robots that were in war against humans a hundred years ago. Those robots are completely isolated and don’t have any contact with humans, but would kill any unfortunate human being who happen to get close to their planet.

Naturally, the human race is worried about what robots are developing so secretly, and send spies, disguised as robots, to try to find out what they are up to. You are one of those spies, who unfortunately was caught accessing sensitive data. Robots, however, are not very sure whether you are human or not, so they have imprisoned you. This is where the game starts.

Turing Adventure is a more or less typical graphic adventure otherwise, but there is no dialog lines for the player to choose when interacting with others. Instead, you type what you want to say. That makes the player feel a closer relationship between her and the main character, since the words the latest says are her very own.

This is not like typing commands or trying basic conversations in old conversation adventures. When I say that you can type what you want to say, I mean it. You can question NPC’s about the quest at hand… Or you can chat with them about your job, your hobbies, your dreams… Whatever! They will respond!

This approach forces the player to stop, analyze the situation and, for the first time in graphic adventures, really think: what would I do, and what would I say, if I were actually there?

Talking to characters that can give you a reasonable conversation about any topic has the risk of inviting the player to try to have fun with the chatbot instead of playing true to her character. That’s why in the game, you have a timing factor to overcome. The countdown on an artifact that looks like a bomb, the music, the light… If you ask the robots about those elements, they will inform you in a casual way: You are dying in five minutes.

All is designed to give the player a feeling of urge and stress, so she won’t mess around and try to focus on the task at hand: escape the prison.

I expect all this elements to help the player feel a deeper connection with the main character, since they address the two problems I discussed above.

Moreover, players will empathize with non-playable characters more than usual, thanks to psychological known effects of human-machine interactions, like the Eliza Effect. It is proven that humans tend to feel empathy with machines that show some human qualities: whether it might be a humanoid body, a face or other medium to show emotions, or, in this case, the ability to talk. That opens a new dimension for non-playable characters in games, where they can show their personalities not only in their design, background, and a few dialog lines, but in whole conversations.

We are diving further in this topic in further posts.

Finally, although sometimes surprisingly clever, chatbots, even those that we are using for Turing Adventure, cannot talk as humans. That means that they have limitations, and some responses feel artificial, out of context, or out of place… if you expect to talk with a sentient being.

But you would forgive those weird answer if you were talking to a machine, like a personal assistant (e.g.: Siri, Cortana). That’s why Turing Adventure is set in a robot planet full of robots: When they’ll give you some unnatural response you’ll thing: Well, robots… and won’t feel it out of place. At this point, you may know how much I try to fight things that are out of place.

 

And, speaking about digital assistants, I expect them to get much more in fashion during the next couple of years. So I hope Turing Adventure has arrived at the right moment.

This is Part One of an ongoing series of post describing the design of Turing Adventure. You can try the game and vote for it in the Adventure Jam here.

• Part One: Motivation: Feel the adventure
• Part Two: How to push the adventure feeling further
• Part Three: Turing Adventure: Overview and design choices
• Part Four: AIML: The technology behind Turing Adventure
• Part Five: The psychology of human-chatbots interactions
• Part Six: Technical and design difficulties

Make the conversation matter

Once of the things that unnecessarily hurt the “I’m living it” sensation is the classical tree dialog system. Often, the NPC respond to your questions as long as you keep asking, so you don’t worry about what actual question you make. You can always go back in the tree and try other path. There are of course in some conversations some tree leaves that are triggers, but more often than not, they are easily avoidable, at least until you’re sure that there are no more dialog lines.

Some games present you with different options at the same time that are all triggers, but any of those options have the same consequences (with the only possible exception of choosing between several game endings -or between the light and dark side). Players choose between them trying to play true to their characters, but those choices are actually just illusions of freedom.

Other games are slowly innovating in this area. To name one, Kentucky Route Zero often presents the player several choices that have a small but persistent impact in the story. They are triggers, unavoidable, and have consequences fot the rest of the game. For example, you have to choose the name of the dog that accompanies you when you’re asked about its name, and the one you choose will be its name for the rest of the game. It is not a huge consequence, but after choosing poorly a couple of times, thinking that you can go back to explore the rest of the dialog, you start thinking twice the answer you give. It’s a small change, but is a huge deal regarding gameplay.

However, no matter how much we tweak it, the real thing preventing you from impersonating the real adventurer is the mechanic of choosing itself! What if we get rid of it? What if you have to think exactly what you are saying?

Make the timing matter

Other aspect in adventure games that make the sensation you feel while playing different to what, say, Indiana Jones may feel in the film, is the timing. Don’t get me wrong: a puzzle should be a puzzle, with time to think it over, and it’s ok to combine relaxing events with rush times. However, you don’t think the same way, or more important, feel the same, when a giant rolling ball is about to smash you, than when you know you are safe. That is the reason why in adventure games you do things that are at odds with what a character of a book or a movie would do.

Many players would enjoy exploring the Far Cry world (I certainly do!), or try to complete all the bits of the game. On the other hand, 007 would take a moment to admire that amazing Asian landscape from time to time, but he would never stop the mission just to see what’s there, or to speak with every single citizen of a village. And we want the player feels like 007, right?

I believe a right balance can be achieved, and that includes stressing the player in some parts of the game, according with the necessities of the narrative.

Besides, giving the player a peak to an awesome environment but not letting him explore completely will make her feel that this environment is real and even infinite. Isn’t that awesome?

This is Part One of an ongoing series of post describing the design of Turing Adventure. You can try the game and vote for it in the Adventure Jam here.

• Part One: Motivation: Feel the adventure
• Part Two: How to push the adventure feeling further
• Part Three: Turing Adventure: Overview and design choices
• Part Four: AIML: The technology behind Turing Adventure
• Part Five: The psychology of human-chatbots interactions
• Part Six: Technical and design difficulties

Motivation: Feel the adventure

There is something somewhat wrong with adventure games.

You play them to live an adventure. Years after you completed a game, you look back and what you remember is you, incarnating the adventure’s hero, penetrating dungeons, confronting monsters and saving the day. Well, this is what it is supposed to happen, and it works. So, what’s the problem? The problem is that the following comic is funny:

Can you imagine Aragorn doing that in the book? Or Indiana Jones when exiting the Temple of Doom? No, that’s wouldn’t make sense. Nevertheless, it is quite accepted in video games.

So the problem is the game mechanic. The game mechanic is fun, but not always supports the history, and thus, do not support the adventure experience. Current game mechanics not only allow the player to behave in unnatural ways for the history, but sometimes encourage it. At the end, they’re fun, and buy gameplay time. But that is not the adventure. The result is a crossover between a casual pastime and an adventure experience, but, guess what: In some years, you will remember the adventure, not the inventory management or the minigames.

Not convinced? Let me give you a clearer example:

If you enjoy and play graphic adventures or computer RPG often, tell me that you don’t play them the thorough way. You won’t, because, well, of course you do. This comic opened my eyes. It made me realize that you are doing it wrong (and me too).

In years to come, when you remember the graphic adventure, you won’t remember going thoroughly through the conversation tree, you’ll remember the adventure. And you’ll remember it as something exciting.

Let’s recap a bit: The game mechanics are fun to play, they increase the gameplay time, and if the story is worth it, you’ll get the memories of living an adventure, ala Total Recall.

Then why do I insist that there’s a problem on it? Because, if not for the game mechanic, you’d have the sensation of living the adventure while you are playing it, not in the future. And that would be definitely be better.

Yes, it is true that you have the sensation of living adventure when something happens, but in the meantime, you have the sensation of solving cardboard puzzles: No dangers, no excitement, no rush… no adventure!

We can do better.