Jeff Orkin
MIT Media Lab
It is often noted that players are both the actors and the audience in the games they play. Less light has been shed on the similar dual existence of designers -- as both the writers and the audience of their games, once their creations are released into the wild. Games offer a variety of fun unique from other media, inviting players to explore and test the boundaries of their simulated worlds, effectively testing the limits of the designers’ imaginations. Traditionally, exposing these limitations has not been hard for players, but today, in the Petabyte age, we can do better. Ubiquitous online games and cheap storage introduce a feedback loop, enabling designers to crowd-source the imaginations of thousands (or even millions) of players, and capture models of human behavior and dialogue capable of generating robust, surprising, fun interactions in future games. As a first step in this direction, we present early progress generating dialogue and behavior from recorded gameplay of 15,000 players of The Restaurant Game, and describe how this methodology is being adapted to other scenarios for human-robot interaction, medical training, and interactive storytelling.