Philips Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy - Manual (Page 185)

Trigger Happy
187
clear that, even if Olivier Masclef’s ambition to have
the computer generate the characters’ responses
automatically is fulfilled, the process will never feel
like a conversation to the player as long as he is
constricted by having to choose from a set of
predetermined speechlets.
Superior though Outcast may be, the player can still
only choose between conversational options that are
offered to him by the computer. Whether these choices
are predetermined by the designer or computed in real
time by the processor is irrelevant. The fact remains
that the player still cannot do something that the game
is not prepared to allow.
Talking it over
How could such freedom even be possible? To let a
player “say” anything he or she liked in a videogame
conversation, the machine’s processor would need, in
short, to be able to parse natural language, to
understand and respond to whatever was said to it in
English (or American, Japanese, German, Finnish and
so on), either via a keyboard interface or by analyzing
speech waves. This is such a massively difficult thing
to get a computer to do that it actually constitutes one
minimal requirement of Strong AI: the Turing Test.