Keynote Speakers
Borut Pfeifer
Talk: Procedural Storytelling in Weird West
Weird West, as an action RPG, is a game with very high player agency, allowing for players to forge their paths, kill almost any major story character, and has multiple factions that can be aligned with or against. This talk is a case study of the variety of storytelling systems used in the development of Weird West. It will cover both its procedural narrative technologies, and how the same techniques and authoring methodologies were crucial in creating bespoke content for the game. The game relies on this variety of systems to help create a meaningfully unique player experience that can also bridge that wide variety of player choices.
Bio: Borut Pfeifer has worked in video games as a programmer and designer for over 20 years. From working on early open-world games like Scarface: The World is Yours, to working with Stephen Spielberg and Doug Church at Electronic Arts, to his most recent release with Wolfeye Studios, Weird West, Borut has tried to push on the boundaries of procedural characters and stories in games. He has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences like GDC, and has many published articles on game AI. He is currently Lead Engineer on Never Alone 2 with E-line Media.
Jill Fain Lehman
Talk: Growing Up with Belle
Language-based character interaction (LBCI) is a unique form of digital entertainment that forces us to face head-on all the strengths and weaknesses in human communication. From Turtle Talk with Crush to the D3-09 In-room Droid, the progress from human-in-the-loop to autonomous character has been a history of experiential engineering in which we choose to ignore almost as much about language as we choose to accommodate. Drawing from almost a decade at Disney Research, I’ll talk about what we’ve learned to do, what we still can’t, and why Large Language Models like LaMDA and its brethren won’t help us solve the most interesting problems that remain in repeated interaction over time.
Bio: Jill Fain Lehman has spent more than 40 years in academia and industry exploring ways to leverage and accommodate human language behavior in human-machine interaction. Whether working with children or adults, in education, healthcare or entertainment, her driving focus has always been on the way language changes as a function of the interaction itself, and the resulting need for systems to adapt. She has more than 100 publications and eight patents and is currently a Senior Project Scientist in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.
Ankur Oswal
Talk: Sgt Johnson on Level 3
At Obsidian Entertainment, we build immersive, player-driven stories where choices matter. At the center of our games is AI. Through the experiences of building and cultivating NPCs in The Outer Worlds and Avowed, this talk will go over the thought process and considerations that are made when creating large AI architectures for RPGs. Using combat and non-combat behaviors, we’ll discuss pros and cons of different structures and how to best use them to achieve project goals. And of course, the human element of it when a designer breaks expectations and wants your AI to do something that you didn’t plan for (i.e., “I want Sgt Johnson to jump a on platform in level 3.”).
Bio: Ankur Oswal has been working at Obsidian Entertainment for over 7 years working as a programmer. He has shipped and worked on various RPG titles (Pathfinder, Tyranny, The Outer Worlds, Avowed) with a focus on AI. Through these continual releases, Ankur strives to push the RPG genre forward through writing pragmatic AI. He is currently a Senior AI Programmer leading the AI on Avowed at Obsidian Entertainment.