Commenting on the hilarious trolling by SL player "Wendy" on Convai's new LLM-powered bots, reader Martin K. has some good thoughts on how to better optimize NPC conversation, referencing a classic game design text:
To me it looks as if Wendy was intentionally evading the NPC's questions in order to stall the progress of the narrative.
Now, participants who are unwilling (or unable) to play their part in a narrative are nothing new in interactive storytelling. And general solutions to this problem have been proposed, for example, by Brenda Laurel in her book Computers as Theatre.
Her solution is to increasingly limit the choices of participants (as illustrated by the "flying wedge" in her book). For example, after a while, the NPC would stop asking open questions, but instead ask leading questions that remind the participant of their objective in the current narrative.
If that doesn't work, the NPC could just assume the participant's objective and ask them for confirmation. And if that doesn't work, the NPC could just make an offer that is either accepted or declined by the participant, i.e., the participant's choice is reduced to a binary decision.
A further escalation would be to make it clear (by dialog or by environmental events) that very bad things will happen to the participant if they don't agree to the NPC's offer. The last escalation could be to take all agency away from the participant and just progress the narrative without the participant's contribution.
In any case, the result would be that sooner or later the narrative progresses -- even for uncooperative participants.
Would it be more difficult to author all these possibilities? Sure; but for an NPC who apparently is already waiting for certain requests, this scheme of offering increasingly limited choices (open question -> leading question -> question for confirmation -> offer -> offer to rescue from threat) is probably straightforward to implement - not only for one specific dialog, but for many of them.
This all sounds roughly right, and a good guide for designing NPC dialog trees. Though again, references to "progress of the narrative" assumes there's clear purposes and goals in an open-ended virtual world like Second Life.
In this specific implementation, it makes more sense to connect the NPCs to some kind of HUD-based RPG -- called Island Quest, or whatever -- and give the NPCs special markings/characteristics which make their purpose clear. I don't know if it's even feasible to create an NPC that's effective as both a quest giver and as a random casual chat buddy, but per Damion Schubert's MMO design notes, I'm guessing not.
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