The Turing Quest: Can Transformers Make Good NPCs?

Qi Chen Gao, Ali Emami


Abstract
In this paper, we study the viability of the deployment of language models towards non-playable character (NPC) scripts, by introducing a novel pipeline for the automatic construction of NPC scripts using Transformer-based believable scripts for a variety of game genres and specifications. In addition, we propose a self-diagnosis method inspired by previous work to develop language models, tailored specifically to desirable NPC qualities such as coherency, believability, and degree of repetition. Finally, we propose a new benchmark, called The Turing Quest, which we use to show that the pipeline, when applied to GPT-3, can generate for a variety of game genres and contexts, NPC scripts that can fool judges in thinking they have been written by humans. We believe that these findings can greatly benefit both the gaming industry and its global community of users, since many current games continue to base their NPCs on manually-curated scripts that are resource-demanding and may curb the immersiveness and enjoyment of the user.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-srw.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Vishakh Padmakumar, Gisela Vallejo, Yao Fu
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
93–103
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.17
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-srw.17
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Chen Gao and Ali Emami. 2023. The Turing Quest: Can Transformers Make Good NPCs?. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 93–103, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Turing Quest: Can Transformers Make Good NPCs? (Gao & Emami, ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-srw.17.pdf