"I'm Not Sure What To Say About That"

I got quite excited the other day, when Nimgimli pointed me to something Square Enix were trying out on Steam. They're calling it a "Tech Preview" and the description describes it as "a demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology".

As far as I can tell, Square have grubbed up a very old adventure game called The Portopia Serial Murder Case, originally released in 1983 (!) for a system called the NEC PC-6000 and force-fed it their proprietary AI tech to see what might happen. According to Wikipedia, the original game has suffered similar indignities in the past, having been ported to a few other long-forgotten platforms before eventually making its way into the mobile market and finally arriving on Windows and Steam as a shill for Square's "natural language processing technology."

Again according to Wikipedia, TPSMC ,as I'm going to call it to save all that typing, went down pretty well in Japan on its original release and was seen as being influential in the development of the visual novel genre. It sounds like the kind of game I'd enjoy, with its "point-and-click, murder mystery plot, open world, suspect interrogations, nonlinear gameplay, dialogue choices, and alternate endings" which, as a review in the Official XBox Magazine a few years back pointed out, were "standard for 2015, but way ahead of its time in 1983".

The Tech Preview is free to play on Steam so I thought I'd give it a try. I was somewhat surprised at the size of the download which, at more than 8GB, seemed like it would have required a government supercomputer to run in 1983, not a rinky-dink home computer. The System Requirements actually ask for 15GB though, so I guess I got off lightly.

Those requirements also contain a curious note about Speech Recognition: "Voice Input (Speech To Text) requires CUDA cores. (*1) VRAM 8GB and above required when using “Medium” in Voice Input quality settings. (*2) VRAM 16GB and above required when using “High” in Voice Input quality settings. Keyboard and/or Microphone support only." It seems to suggest you can play the game by talking to the characters rather than typing your conversations and reading their replies. 

That's something that would very much have been seen as the expected future of computing back in the 1980s, when Japanese tech giants were throwing vast amounts of money and effort behind the so-called "5th Generation", one of whose fundemental principles was to replace keyboard input with the spoken word. Much like videophones, which were a solved problem by the early '90s but which failed to attract any kind of interest from the public, speech recognition, when it was perfected, turned out to be something most people didn't want - and arguably still don't.

Still, I'd like to try it in an adventure game whose gameplay revolves around interrogation. It seems like a natural fit, especially when you throw in AI. I'm already excited for the inevitable and probably imminent integration of language processing AIs like Bard and ChatGPT with Smart Speakers and Virtual Assistants like Alexa and Siri. To see something like that in a game would be amazing.

There's only one drawback. I don't have a microphone.

Okay, technically I do have one. I actually have several, including two integrated webcam/mics that I acquired when I foolishly bought into John Smedley's lucicrous SOEmote fantasy ,of which the less said, the better. 

What? You don't remember SOEmote? Oh, what the hell...

I guess if you have a naturally gurning, cartoonish face like Dave Georgeson, maybe it would seem like a good idea, although evet then it would actually have to work...

Anyway, while I might theoretically own some mics, I don't have one to hand and even if I did, I definitely don't want to start fiddling around trying to get this game to recognize it. I mean, I might, if I thought there was the least chance of it actually working, but I've tried the text input. "Fool me once..." as they say.

About that text input. Y'know, I've played a lot of adventure games. I was already playing them when TPSMC first came out, back in the very early '80s. I used to sit there, with my first wife, in our first appartment, typing keywords and phrases into the ZXSpectrum's rubbery keyboard, hoping to see some kind of acknowledgement or recognition on the portable TV in front of us.

A decade and a half later I'd do the same thing, with Mrs Bhagpuss leaning over my shoulder and making suggestions, as we plowed our way through Broken Swords #1 and #2. Even EverQuest used a text parser before someone at SOE finally got around to adding clickable keywords.

Any - all - of those text parsers were orders of magnitude better than whatever the hell "Tech" it is that Square Enix thinks they're previewing here. And I'm not the only one making that assessment. As I write, the game or demo or whatever it's supposed to be has Steam's lowest possible rating - Very Negative - and in my opinion it's lucky to have a score as high as that.

Try some choice comments from angry reviewers:

"...the "AI" in this game is a joke. It is perhaps even worse than the text parsing of the original game, from 40 (!) years ago."

"GEEZ It's like they didn't even try...."

 "Zork (1977) had a better understanding of what your commands meant"

"Early text-based RPGs are way smarter at responses than this."

"basically it understands less inputs than the original King's Quest"

"This is a fascinating idea, but the execution is... I'm not sure it even rises to the level of "weak." It's not in evidence at all."

Aha! I think we've hit on the problem!

"Barely works. They say they removed the AI component due to safety concerns... so this doesn't even have the tech that it was supposed to be a preview of in the first place."

Well, that explains a lot. Okay, it doesn't explain how the game as it stands is literally worse than the basic, acceptable standard of games of its type from the era in which it was made, but it does answer the question I was asking myslef throughout the whole of the five (Count 'em - five!) minutes I could stick playing the blasted thing, namely "AI? What AI?"

I thought I should check if the allegation was true, so I asked Bard. Bard, being an actual generative AI, not a pretend one, was quick to give me the full story:

Hi Bard, Can you tell me if Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case?

Yes, Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The demo was released on April 24, 2023, and it allowed players to interact with the game world using natural language processing (NLP). However, the AI component was disabled on April 27, 2023, after players began to exploit it to generate offensive and inappropriate content.

In a statement, Square Enix said that they were "disappointed" that the AI component had been used in this way. They said that they were "committed to providing a safe and enjoyable experience for all players" and that they were "working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way."

The disabled AI component was a major disappointment for many players who were looking forward to trying out this new technology. However, Square Enix has said that they are working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way. It is possible that the AI component will be re-enabled in the future, but it is not clear when this will happen.

Other than Bard's curious ability to predict the future (Check the dates it's quoting - I almost missed it.) and fondness for repeating itself, that seems to be a reasonably accurate account of what happened. It's corroborated by this report at BeyondGames.biz and many others as well. 

So much for that "preview". It does invite the question "Why leave the bloody thing up with the claim the AI's still in there, then?", but since this is Square Enix we're talking about, I wouldn't expect a coherent answer.

Someone is going to get this tech hooked up and working effectively but clearly that someone is not going to be Square Enix, who seem to be about as realistic in their expectations and as technologically capable of achieving them as Smed and Smokejumper's SOE. 

And we al know what happened to them...