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After some 6 years of work on the technology, and about 18 months on the prototype, the rollout of the Bot Colony at GDC today is a huge milestone for us. The game relies on some very innovating Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology.  We believe it is the first conversation game ever, That’s how it was advertised in Times Square Monday this week (The 80 character message was www.botcolony.com FIRST CONVERSATION GAME EVER www.botcolony.com SEE IT ON YouTube). Claims about being first are always met with skepticism, so I’ll try to make that claim as precise as I can:

Natural  language understanding coupled with truly interactive reasoning and generation have not yet been deployed in video games in a significant way. In this respect, Bot Colony will define an important technological milestone. Natural language interfaces to video games (without parsing, reasoning, dialogue management and  interactive generation) were deployed before:

- Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic is perhaps the first game where the player chats with the game’s characters (also robots). However, the level of ‘understanding’ of the Spookitalk engine powering the game is very different from Bot Colony. Wikipedia says ‘Spookitalk had the ability to converse with the player in an almost lifelike manner, partially because it incorporated over 10,000 different phrases, pre-recorded by a group of talented voice actors. The recorded phrases would take over 14 hours to play back-to-back.’  In Bot Colony, the response will not be pre-recorded, but rather a result of a parsing, reasoning on a fact base, and generation.

- Games like The Last Express, or more recently Hotel Dusk rely on dialogue trees, where the player selects among pre-programmed responses.

- Responses in a game like Facade are based on heuristics on the game’s micro-domain (see the paper Natural Language Processing in Facade: Surface-text Processing, by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern). Surface text processing means picking up certain keywords or phrases and reacting to them. There is no deep language processing and reasoning, as in Bot Colony.

Therefore, these earlier games don’t materially affect the claim that Bot Colony is the first conversation game ever.

I hope that GDC will be the beginning of our community building effort. Bot Colony is a game that has the potential of causing paradigm shifts in how game play and immersion are understood.  It’s a special game, and I’d like to build a really special community around it - people who are interested to work with us to help make this game all it can be. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, both in game building (only about 1/3 of the levels of the game have been built), and on the technology front. The Beta site sign-up will be up during GDC, and we’re targeting July for the start of the closed Beta program. I also hope that we’ll find partners who will work with us, to help us make Bot Colony available on other platforms.

Bot Colony rollout at GDC is now less than 4 hours away.