Natural Language AI Struggles to Enable Meaningful Gameplay Interactions
• Prototyped a game with NPCs that use natural language interfaces, found it did not work well for meaningful gameplay • Settled on a western-themed game called Dante's Cowboy to release as an experiment with NPC communication • Interacting via language is easy to implement but shallow; convincing NPCs to do things is more complex • Challenges are driving meaningful interactions, aligning AI behavior with gameplay context, and managing API costs • Natural language AI in games can end up being a complicated alternative to pressing buttons; integrating it meaningfully requires new approaches