The dialogue pipeline running on a server-farm is the key technological innovation in the game. While North Side is not claiming to have passed the Turing test. That would mean that if a person saw only the transcript of a dialog between the player and a game character, he would not be able to tell if the dialog was between two humans, or a human and a computer. North Side does not claim that its software performs perfectly. Natural language understanding is a very hard problem, and the company’s objective is to understand language well enough in order to complete the levels of the game, or to help people improve their English. In many cases, the software may not understand the player and will ask for clarification. This is part and parcel of the Bot Colony gameplay. It is not difficult to say something that a character will not understand – the real challenge is to get through to characters, and advance in the game. The language software is general purpose, and not tied to the Bot Colony game in particular. In general, the hardest problems in understanding language are tied to the lack of sufficient world knowledge: things that are obvious to a person are not known to a computer – but they are needed to understand what someone said.

In Bot Colony, game objects behave and interact like objects in the real-world, further enhancing this feeling of immersion. The Bot Colony game engine, Anitron, is data-driven, so all scenes are actually real-time simulations. There’s no need to use cut scenes.

English-based scripting

Bot Colony is not programmed in a traditional way. All game logic, animations and interactions are entirely scripted in English. English-based scripting will enable players to extend the game world with their own content. A script describes in simple English how a game entity should react, when its context and probable goals are taken into account.

The language software attempts to extract the correct meaning from a player’s utterance, irrespective of the particular words or the syntax used, and attempts to it to a familiar context. This means that a player may formulate the same message in many different ways and the game will extract the same semantics in all cases.

Bot Colony relies on plan recognition to infer the player's goals, and use the knowledge of the player's goals to direct the characters' behaviours. The behaviour of goal-driven intelligent robots who fulfill plans has been romanticized in the Bot Colony novel (see page 32, School), and this is actually what has been implemented in the game. While the player's goals can only be inferred from his actions, which we assume to be part of plans, the behaviour of the other characters is entirely goal-driven. When they recognize a certain context, they spring into action and fulfill the plan triggered by that context.
Both the player's and the characters' goals, plans and context in Bot Colony are scripted in controlled-English. We plan to make available the natural-language-based scripting environment to the user community, so that players can extend the game.

North Side believes that its innovative use of English as a scripting language will enable players to extend the world by adding their own content. This English-based scripting technology has additional applications, for example to rapid visualization of movie scripts, workflow visualization, debrief, and exploring alternative courses of action.