SpyParty, the long-awaited indie game which recently hit the Steam store, is pretty much like the Turing Test, except with headshots. In Alan Turing's challenge, you have to guess whether you're communicating with an AI or a human, based on what they say. In SpyParty, from acclaimed game designer Chris Hecker, you have to guess which avatar among a crowd of AI-powered avatars is actually being controlled by a human, based on what they do. Which, yes, means competing with another player who has to pretend to be an avatar-based AI. (Watch the trailer above to see what I mean.)
"[T]hroughout my work in games," Hecker tells me, "I've always tended to flip things around. So for the Spore creature animation system, instead of trying to procedurally generate animations, I tried to figure out how animators work and map that back onto the player-created creatures. So in some sense flipping around the usual 'make the AIs behave like people' thing to make the player behave like an AI was squarely in my wheelhouse." (Here is Hecker hanging with his former boss Will Wright, lead creator of Spore, among other industry leaders, including Rod Humble.)
This meant creating a pretty complex system of AI behavior for the avatars at the party -- but also making it routine enough that a human can learn to emulate an AI:
"They have a lot of layered behaviors, so they can be holding a drink while they're having a conversation, and the system tries to balance between these," says Hecker. "A lot of the complexity comes from the interactions between these 'situations' as I call them. I add more and more of these as time goes on. I don't think they'll ever be mistaken for humans, but again, that's not the goal, they just have to be emulate-able for a human, so in some sense having a 'clockwork' AI that has some probabilistic predictability is good."
Hecker has been conducting player testing for many years, and has seen some interesting emergent behavior and trends emerge:
"There are just so many, given that it's been 8 years. The Sniper side at the elite level breaks into three distinct styles, and while most people are hybrids of these styles, we have some folks who are extreme examples of each:
"The styles are 'campers', who constantly scan the 'hard tell' missions (the ones with clear visible tells) for Spies trying to accomplish them, 'behaviorists' who look for partygoers acting funny or with too much intent, and 'etiquette' snipers, who watch for people breaking tiny rules of the game, like when animations are interrupted, how the pathing system works for walking, and the like."
A Sniper tester had an interesting insight from real world social interactions that they cleverly applied to the game:
"[A] player once figured out that Spies tend to talk second in conversations... if you enter a conversation, you feel like it's suspicious if you just immediately talk, so you wait and then talk after the first person is done. This is an amazing behavioral observation, and he shot a lot of Spies for this!"
But the game isn't just a James Bond-flavored Turing Test:
"A huge chunk of it is this, but then another big part is reading the party and knowing when the Sniper is distracted by other AIs so you can do missions, which the NPCs never do. One of the aesthetic themes of the game is 'attention as a resource', and how the Spy and Sniper spend their attention and trying to influence how the other player spends it is a large part of playing effectively."
Get the game on Steam here, and let me know, dear reader, if you do -- if there's enough interest, I might start doing SpyParty embedded journalism!
Comments