5 Comments
Nov 11, 2021Liked by Aaron A. Reed

This is the game so far that I’ve found the most fascinating. As I was reading the article, I decided I needed to play this game. Gutted that I am unable to. Sounds so wonderfully interesting. Thank you for doing this series, it has been great!

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Nov 11, 2021Liked by Aaron A. Reed

Thank you for this lovely post-mortem. I've been wondering for quite a long time what happened with Versu, especially as it seems like very little progress has been made since then on modeling "realistic" NPC conversation behavior.

And yes, I've been told that plenty of progress HAS indeed been made, so no need for chastisements :) However, I get the feeling that if this nut ever does get well and fully cracked, it's going to lead to a heck of a lot more than just some cool IF games. Frankly, there's an entire universe of digital assistants slash chatbots slash other-name-yet-devised that may one day be able to speak as coherently as that 2013 Spike Jonze movie.

PS - I also have a sneaking suspicion that the Victorian-era conversation model was a heck of a lot more robust than the one currently being used by people for modern speech.

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This is for sure one of those things that sounds very interesting, especially so since so few people got to play the game in question. But let's not forget about Icebound: Concordance, which not very many people can have played, but was pretty damn interesting as well, at the forefront of something (I had the book, gave it to a friend some time ago, though). Just wanted to chime in on that. :) Thanks for this series, as well.

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"even *if* bad luck kept their experiment from claiming" --> even though

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