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virtual psychotherapist. The user had a rudimentary
conversation with it by typing answers to its questions,
and Eliza would then respond to those answers and ask
for further elaboration. “Eliza was one of the really
exciting events throughout the computer industry,”
Darling recalls, “because you could type to it and it
wrote back to you. It’s interesting, I think, that in the
games world, AI hasn’t to me actually exceeded that
excitement level.”
With current videogame hardware thousands of
times faster and more sophisticated, great strides could
have been made toward in-corporating more fluent
language engines in games, and even steering them
toward something approaching true conversation. But
that evolutionary path was not taken. “Unfortunately,”
Richard Darling says, “I think we’ve gone through a bit
of a dark age as far as communication AI is concerned,
but we’ll hopefully come out of that soon.”
Instead, the kind of static puzzles that used to be
typical of adventure games persist in what some call
“action adventures” (they belong in our genre of
exploration games). How does this work? Well, a game
such as Resident Evil, for example, is built on exactly
the same kind of puzzles that were the meat and drink
of text adventures in their heyday. A nasty
