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Robert Zubek Profile picture
Robert Zubek
@rzubek
I make games. Big fan of simulations. Founder of @SomaSim_Games; previously EA, Three Rings, Zynga; #AI PhD. Also teaches #gamedev at @NorthwesternU.
Feb 12, 2023 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
A propos of this conversation from yesterday:


Here's a super quick sketch of how ChatGPT could be merged with an in-game conversation director, basically working as a human-language interface to the underlying system.

Some screenshots with commentary: 🧵 Imagine we had external conversation state machine which drives everything.

It would tell the LLM exactly what to say (but not how to say it), and use it as a kind of "translator" from unconstrained nat lang to specific speech acts like "i want to buy x".

For example:
Feb 11, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Amusingly, "AI for talking to NPCs inside video games by typing" was literally the topic of my PhD dissertation.

One of the main take-aways was that conversation flow *must* be highly authored, for design and experience purposes.

Just using an ML chatbot is going to... 1/ Just using an ML chatbot is going to lead to a couple of problems that players will notice.

1. NPCs need to reflect game state. ChatGPT doesn't know anything about the inner workings of your game!

2. NPCs need to be able to change game state. If you buy a sword... 2/
Jan 27, 2021 • 23 tweets • 5 min read
A lot has been written today about the $GME pump on /r/WallStreetBets from a financial angle.

But I think there's another angle - this it also works as a *multiplayer game* and one with an interesting design.

Don't believe me? Let's look at it structurally!

1/ WSB pump of $GME exhibits a number of gamelike elements:
1. resource mechanics
2. multiplayer social mechanics
3. progression mechanics
4. multi-system interactions
5. prediction complexity, and
6. a powerful player fantasy to tie them together

2/
Dec 6, 2020 • 15 tweets • 9 min read
@MatthewGuz Hi both @MatthewGuz and @onlinealchemist! So just to continue our previous conversation, here's a bit more worked out thread - curious what you'll think!

And I'll number replies so it's easier to deal with, given Twitter's terrible threading 1/

@MatthewGuz @onlinealchemist (And first of all, terribly sorry if I came off as a bit curt in the last thread! I was just trying to reply quickly on a weekend morning, which was probably a tactical error. ;) And then lack of threading made it into a hash.) 2/
Sep 20, 2020 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
These tweets about Twitter photo cropping have been going around:



So I started looking into how it works. It's interesting and a good example of how AI tech can produce results that look biased, even when the building blocks don't seem to be. Thread! 1/ We know how it works, because Twitter fortunately published the implementation details here:

blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…

(It's from 2018, but I'm assuming it's still in operation.)

The algo is actually refreshingly simple - and interesting.

2/
Aug 31, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Doctorow's monograph response to Zuboff's "Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is making the rounds again.

AoSC is easily one of the best books of the past decade, so I figured I would check out his commentary.

It's worth spending time on, *but*...
1/
... first off: as a *rebuttal*, as such, it's not quite there. The essay takes many of the points previously made by Zuboff and integrates them into its own argument, which is great because they're good points, except it also wants to position itself as a rebuttal. :)

2/
Aug 19, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ok, this game's not bad :) Image Nighttime's pretty cool too Image
Aug 17, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
*Very* cool breakdown of historical references in Epic's recent "198fortnite" parody video.

I learned a few things I didn't know, e.g. Ridley Scott's role in the orig 1984 ad.

I'll just add a couple thoughts of my own, from watching Apple's image evolve over the years... 1/ In Apple's original 1984 ad, a few themes reflected how they saw themselves: David vs IBM Goliath for sure, but also: rebelling vs conforming, daring vs fearing, and being creative vs being a cog in a machine.

(Guess which side Apple saw themselves as ;) ) 2/
Aug 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Just finished "Games: Agency as Art" by @add_hawk

#gamedesign friends: this one's worth checking out!

It's a really good argument for how to understand games, and game design, as a medium that shapes player agency first and foremost, about how it makes players feel... 1/ Image ... to have their agency drastically reshaped, and how this is the core of the aesthetic feeling of playing games, much more so than visuals, narratives, sportsmanship, etc. 2
Jul 12, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Every time I hear about movie studios using analytics to shape their creative process (Netflix etc), I can't help but think of the infamous "People's Choice" paintings based on mass surveys of what people liked.

For an art stunt it was oddly prescient :)

artsy.net/article/artsy-… Image "People's Choice" paintings started with surveys asking people what they liked in art (features etc).

And then pictures were painted with those features.

Here's an example from US surveys: a landscape with lots of blue, a forest, some children, deer, and a George Washington. Image
Jul 5, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It's not even dark yet, and there are already fireworks flying out of every park and parking lot in Chicago. :)

And also, they're technically illegal. But this is also the town that really respected things like the Prohibition ;) Image It's getting better
May 22, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I keep coming back to this postmortem because of all the interesting stuff there.

But this bit was especially cool to read.

This agrees very much with my experiences making tutorials over a number of years and games. The "carefully guided" tutorial is ideal in theory... 1/ Image ... but it's so hard to implement in practice! Especially in systems-heavy games where there are lots of gears turning autonomously, and many opportunities for things to go off-script.

Specifically, guided tutorials rely on setting up the teaching situation *just right*... 2/
Feb 14, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This thread and the quoted dataset: 😮 Two interesting graphs side by side.

1) the number of *indie* games that are bringing good revenues that could sustain and grow a studio: this number if going up at an increasing rate Image
Feb 2, 2020 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Oh wow. Approaches like Meena always leave me so heartbroken about this direction in #AI

Because on one hand, it's a tour de force. 341GB of source text. 2.6B param DNN model. $1.4M in compute time over a calendar month. This has not been done before!

However... 1/ On the NLP side, I'm heartbroken because this approach does not model semantics of the conversation, i.e. the system _doesn't know what it's talking about_, regardless of all the 341GB of text dropped into it. 2/
Dec 22, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I'm starting to think Sapkowski's Witcher fits *very* well into that current in Polish literature, stretching from Reymont to Tokarczuk, which looks at common people in tough times, and points out just how easily they fall into selfishness, fear, cruelty. Inside each of us... ... they might say, lies dormant a beast, ready to take over if we let it, if we don't actively judge and direct our lives. And that beast will trample all over everyone and everything to secure it's safety and status.

And in the Witcher those beasts are very real & physical...
Dec 22, 2019 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Watching the Witcher series on Netflix, only a few episodes in, and really digging it so far.

The way Sapkowski employs fantasy as reflection on human morality is a great counterpoint to both the Tolkien and the GRR Martin style spectacles.

Thread incoming! The reflection on good and evil is especially sharp in this comparison with something like LotR.

Tolkien's world is simple: one side is evil, inherently and irredeemably, while the other side is good, and even weakness and failure won't change that. How Calvinist.
Nov 2, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
On the first day of #NaNoGenMo Rob decided to:
install Stanford.NLP.CoreNLP from NuGet :) Image On the second day of #NaNoGenMo Rob decided to:
parse out sentence structure from RFC451 and use it to spit random sentences right back out. Image
Jul 26, 2019 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Playing Civilization V recently, and reflecting just how *comfortable* it feels to be playing it. It's like a delicious plate of comfort food, something that takes zero effort and just instantly makes you feel better.

But also reflecting on how the only reason this happens... 1/ Image ... is because I've been playing Civ games for almost 25 years. So Civ no longer feel strange or challenging.

It feels well-worn and comfortable.

Which is a bit surprising. Its space of actions and configurations may be huuuge, but I know it better than many IRL spaces... 2/ Image
Jun 3, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Happy Monday! Would you like some indie games that help advance the medium?

Here are random three that I just happened to play recently:

1. Caves of Qud. Systemically complex sim & pcg, of the scope that few creators would dare attempt, including (or: especially) big studios. Image 2. Factorio probably needs no introduction. Extremely into what Costikyan calls "analytic uncertainty", where individual mechanics are simple and easy, but their systemic interactions stress the player's ability to analyze and optimize as the whole thing scales up. Image
May 8, 2019 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
Ok, one last post about the history of the term "game mechanics", just because I find this stuff super interesting. #gamedev #gamedesign #gamestudies thread incoming :) 1/ The use of game "mechanics" and "dynamics" date back at least to the cold-war-era research communities that built games as research and education tools (rather than entertainment experiences). Materials from that era already use these terms in ways that we'd recognize today: 2/
May 3, 2019 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
The earliest mentions of "mechanics" in game design that I could find come from 1962, "Business Simulation in Industrial and University Education":

archive.org/details/busine…

Amusingly, the term is taken as granted and used without a definition, just like today. ;)

See below: Found mentions of "game mechanics" from 1962:
#gamedev #gamedesign #gamestudies ImageImageImageImage