How Event[0] Works | GMTK Most Innovative 2016

one of my favorite games this year and definitely the most innovative game I played was event zero this is a science fiction game about exploring a spaceship and chatting to an artificial intelligence called Kai Zhen whenever you rock up to one of these computer terminals you can type in any question or command you can think of and the AI assistant will actually reply it's like a supercharged text adventure mixed with cleverbot and there's a bit of gone home but with some actual puzzles and the ability to uncover a hidden narrative like in her story in this video I'm going to reveal the secrets behind Kai's ends answers I'm going to talk about how it works why it works and also where the game falls down so this is your chance to pause the video and go check out event zero it's on Steam and while it's a tad pricey for such a short game I found it absolutely enthralling and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in AI storytelling and the future of video games when you're done come back and we'll dive into the game [Music] okay welcome back I hope you enjoyed event 0 as much as I did now let me completely ruin the game for you by explaining how it works Kaizen is ultimately all smoke and mirrors just like any video game AI the developer wasn't trying to pass the Turing test but instead wanted to make an interesting companion or adversary depending on how you play for a player and I think it worked out pretty well let's start by breaking down how event 0 takes your text and spits out an acceptable response hopefully this info is based on a talk by designer Sergey Mojave interviews with the developers and a sneaky peek inside the game's code so let's type in a message and see how the game interprets it first a spellchecker fixes any typos whoops then the game tries to match your words and phrases against a database of tags passengers for example is matched to the tag crew as would lots of other words like humans guests and people these tags are then matched against another database this time listing all of the patterns of tags the Kies n recognizes once the closest match is found the AI can prepare a response first it checks the current event which holds things like your location and things you've seen and talked about which helped give kaizen a memory and context then it looks up its current emotional state Kai's n has three levels of affection for the player and three stress levels making for an emotional matrix with nine different states the input event and emotional state all point Kai's end to a list of responses and it picks one to show to the player and finally some of its words and phrases are replaced with synonyms so the AI almost never repeats the exact same line twice phew and that's how pretty much every response in the game is prepared though there are a few extra wrinkles like how the game will save noun tags in a short-term memory so if you say something about Nandi and then ask is she dead Kaizen will know that she is referring to Nandi it's a smart and surprisingly simple system but it still would have been a huge amount of work developer Ocelot society had to create tag patterns to predict everything the player might say and it had to write responses for Kaizen that match the events and emotional states though it should be noted that there are rarely nine different responses for the nine different states and as for tags event zeroes database has roughly 10,000 words stored in thousands of tags and even after all that work caisson is far from perfect it misunderstands you it offers up weird responses and it sometimes just admits defeat in answering your questions but for me the small issues didn't break the spell because Ocelot society made the genius decision to give this technology to an AI rather than a human character back in 2005 Michael Mateus and Andrew stern made an experimental game called facade where you can type in sin to speak to a bickering couple under the hood facade is a great deal more complex than event zero it has to artificially intelligent characters with more in depth emotional profiles voice acting and facial animation and there are systems in place to ensure the game is delivering dramatic moments but even so it was equally prone to mistakes and when a human character says some ik bizarre it completely shatters the illusion of talking to a real person Kaizen though is a robot and we know full well that robots are imperfect like hey Siri what is the cost of a train ticket from London to Glasgow the answer is about thirteen point six coloured trillion mile u.s. dollars squared what an idiot and Kaizen is clearly a bit knackered with garbled text and malfunctioning terminals it also plays into the sci-fi trope of evil artificial intelligences evasive answers sound like Kaizen is trying to keep things from you and really it just doesn't have an answer and then there's the spaceship Kaizen is made to be an assistant aboard the ship so it only needs to know about the passengers and things you can find by exploring it naturally doesn't know much about giraffes or the history of Mozambique but it can go on and on about origami or the pool table in the living room so we've built a functioning chat bot and we've forgiven its mistakes now we need to build a game around it and this is where I think event zero fails while Ocelot says it removed lots of ideas including resource management and alien enemies to focus solely on Kaizen the game doesn't actually revolve around the AI in the way you might think this short game has a number of puzzles but most of them are about circumventing Kaizen entirely either by hacking into the a ice code base to play minigames or reading the automated log on each terminal to find close neither of these need a complex chat bot to exist and Kaizen ends up feeling like a glorified hint system for helping with other puzzles the game's standout moments are about building a relationship with the AI manipulating its emotions or trying to talk your way out of things in one memorable moment it doesn't let you back into the ship after a spacewalk and you've either got to apologize or prove your humanity while your oxygen slowly depletes these moments are fantastic but few far between and could have been further developed also the magic of a textfield is that you're not prompted by dialogue options so you have to know exactly what to say the pointer click adventure shiver uses this to good effect to solve puzzles you must remember names and places that you hear and then type them into the game search engine event zero could have done this by hiding the names of crew members around the ship and then having kaizen open up when you ask who is Nandi or what happened to an L instead Kaizen just gives you these names at specific moments in the narrative okay so event zero is a better idea than it is a game let's put the puzzles aside though because this was the first time that I really felt like I was conversing with a character in a video game Kaizen often picked up on what I was saying it understood natural language and it changed its mood depending on the circumstance and how I spoke to it in the grand timeline of gaming AI I think event zero sits somewhere between picking dialogue options in Fallout and Anthony Hopkins chatting with robot cowboys in West world and when during - the lady with the word shoe okay maybe closer to fallout but a glimpse into the future perhaps though I can't see event zero system being used wholesale by other developers anytime soon for one thing the need for a keyboard means the game just isn't viable on consoles and I don't think anybody wants to talk to an NPC by shouting into a Kinect we are but if there's one lesson to be learned here is that it is possible to have a compelling free-flowing and natural conversation with a video game character and you don't need some kind of neural network or supercomputer or ultra complex algorithm to pull it off you just need a big-ass database some ideas pinch from Internet chat BOTS and a few clever indie developers from Paris hi everyone thanks so much for watching a few people guess that event zero would be my most innovative game of the year so good on them well done this will be my last video of the year and I want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has supported the show in 2016 viewers subscribers commenters anyone who has submitted foreign subtitles or sent me a lovely email or shared the episode with their friends on Facebook you're all great and of course every single patron who has literally transformed my life because in 2017 I will be working on this show full-time which is exciting but you know what happens now a super duper special shout out to those donating five bucks or more fish [Music]

Channel: Game Maker's Toolkit

Views: 509,922

Rating: 4.9691186 out of 5

Keywords: game maker's toolkit, event0, ai, artificial intelligence

Id: bCJw4hQkPj4

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 26 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/uzimonkey]

That chat system isn't something you see very often. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure the original Fallout had this system. You could talk to any NPC and in addition to the normal dialog options you could just type in what you wanted to say. I think they even had like an ELIZA bot and you could have a (rather potato) conversation with them, you could get information from them not available in the canned dialog options, etc. If I recall, they even "learned" things, the things NPCs knew changed depending on the events in the world.