Magnavox Trigger Happy Manuel D’Utilisation

 

Trigger Happy 

187 

 

clear that, even if Olivier Masclef’s ambition to have 
the computer generate the characters’ responses 
automatically is fulfilled, the process will never feel 
like a conversation to the player as long as he is 
constricted by having to choose from a set of 
predetermined speechlets. 

Superior though Outcast may be, the player can still 

only choose between conversational options that are 
offered to him by the computer. Whether these choices 
are predetermined by the designer or computed in real 
time by the processor is irrelevant. The fact remains 
that the player still cannot do something that the game 
is not prepared to allow. 
 

How could such freedom even be possible? To let a 
player “say” anything he or she liked in a videogame 
conversation, the machine’s processor would need, in 
short, to be able to parse natural language, to 
understand and respond to whatever was said to it in 
English (or American, Japanese, German, Finnish and 
so on), either via a keyboard interface or by analyzing 
speech waves. This is such a massively difficult thing 
to get a computer to do that it actually constitutes one 
minimal requirement of Strong AI: the Turing Test.