Andrew Stern doesn’t enjoy most AAA video games because he wants to be able to say anything at any moment within a social simulation and be a participant in an interesting story. About once week, he’d like to engage within a high agency, interactive drama with artificially intelligent NPCs. Rather than long and extended play sessions, he’d prefer a short 20-30 minute experience that he play over and over again trying different strategies with characters who feel real and plausible.
This isn’t just a pipe dream because in 2005 Andrew was a co-creator of Façade, which is one of the only interactive drama games that has natural language input and offers both local and global agency to the player. For the past couple of years, Andrew has been working with his Façade collaborator Michael Mateas as well as with Larry LeBron on a DARPA-funded AI program. IMMERSE is a gestural-based, virtual training simulation for soldiers to learn deescalation social skills in non-English speaking environments. I had a chance to catch up with Andrew and Larry to learn more about using AI to create plausible characters, IMMERSE, as well as their new company called Playabl where they’re continuing to develop their Unity AI toolkit for creating fully interactive dramas.
There was a moment when Philipp Maas and Dominik Stockhausen realized that their sci-fi horror film would be a lot more intense and work better if was a virtual reality experience. So they took the opportunity to explore the language of virtual reality from the perspective of filmmakers who were trying to tell a story. In the end, Sonar makes a number of different innovations to the language of cinematic VR that I think are worth unpacking. I caught up with the two creators at Sundance New Frontier where Sonar featured within the mobile VR section.
