Freedom in Video Game Dialog: An Improvement on Player Immersion

Abstract

Video game dialog generally consist of giving a player a few scripted options to choose from at an interaction point in the game. Allowing players to enter their own dialog can enhance player immersion. There is difficultly in allowing for natural language to drive the narrative of a game. Conceptual dependency theory, which gives a simple representation of natural language that is independent of its original syntactic representation, makes it easy to represent multiple semantically-similar sentences in the same way. Using this theory, a dialog engine was designed to allow game developers to write a small set of rules on player input for every interaction to determine an appropriate response.