Company that makes generative AI-powered NPCs reports that 95% of players enjoy their generative AI-powered NPCs

Hands up if you've ever thought the following: "Sure, Elden Ring is pretty great, but what it really needs is the mournful, silent creature I'm fighting to say something FromSoft didn't write like 'come at me, ye tarnished dickhead'" during a tense encounter. If you do have your hand raised, I imagine you likely already work for Meaning Machine, the company who still proudly boast their 'Battle Banter' tool on their website, a "Game Conscious™" system that "gives NPCs the ability to deliver reactive dialogue in response to real-time gameplay." You spin. A gargoyle with no voice box calls you out for spinning. That sort of thing.

Meaning Machine is also the developer behind Dead Meat, a noirish murder mystery detective game which, from the limited footage I've seen, doesn't immediately strike me as the sort of slop you might expect. It's broadly stylish in a classic cartoon sort of way. The idea is you'll interrogate NPCs by asking your own questions using either microphone or keyboard, and they'll give custom responses in slightly offputting AI voices. You know the type. They sound adjacent to humans, but there are uncanny wrinkles in the delivery that just make it all seem off.

Still, it would seem I'm an outlier here, at least compared to the 68 people who recently played Dead Meat at a study Meaning Machine conducted with the University Of Bristol, via Gamesindustry.biz. 95% of participants "found the experience enjoyable", 97% found it rewarding, and 75% felt the games let them "express themselves or make meaningful choices".

"This research helps to ground what is otherwise quite an emotionally charged debate about AI in games,” said lead researcher Dr Richard Cole. “It does this by putting the player at the heart of the debate—asking what they feel about AI-powered experiences in practice, not just in theory."

"Players kick back at AI that is taking away from creativity," said Meaning Machine's co-founder Thomas Keane. "But when AI is used to power totally new types of interactive experience, then it’s a very different story." I suppose it is technically possible that someone could say those words in that order and not come across as so smug I want to throw myself into a lake, but not someone who's got a horse in the race.

While the full paper will be out at the end of the year, the available study (which frequently uses the same branding font as Dead Meat itself, like all good academic research) says that the 68 participants played Dead Meat for 20 minutes each, and acknowledges that's a limiting factor: "We don't yet know how players will respond to a longer play session, although we do know from our sample that they want to do this".

I can imagine that, in that timeframe, you could approach the games in the study like interactive novelty exhibitions, and they wouldn't hold up too badly. That's not especially convincing when it comes to these NPCs providing a comparable experience to one crafted by actual writers in the long term, though.

It's also not clear whether the participants knew exactly what the study was going to entail before starting. It looks like players knew about the gen AI NPC's before reporting they enjoyed their time. They were presumably fine with gen AI games on principle, in other words. That's a far cry from assuming that at least some players won't just reject these games outright. I quite enjoy taking absurdly long showers, but I know it's probably not great for the environment, so I try to avoid it. And my shower never convinced a studio to lay off a bunch of staff so it could take all their money.