Trigger Happy
virtual psychotherapist. The user had a rudimentary conversation with it by typing answers to its questions, and Eliza would then respond to those answers and ask for further elaboration. “Eliza was one of the really exciting events throughout the computer industry,” Darling recalls, “because you could type to it and it wrote back to you. It’s interesting, I think, that in the games world, AI hasn’t to me actually exceeded that excitement level.”
With current videogame hardware thousands of times faster and more sophisticated, great strides could have been made toward
Instead, the kind of static puzzles that used to be typical of adventure games persist in what some call “action adventures” (they belong in our genre of exploration games). How does this work? Well, a game such as Resident Evil, for example, is built on exactly the same kind of puzzles that were the meat and drink of text adventures in their heyday. A nasty
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