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Back to School for NWN

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

Neverwinter Nights has demonstrated its impressive utility for RPG gamers by being a great tool for creating your own modules, allowing new and exciting content to be utilized, and connecting friends from around the world for some serious adventure time. Therefore, it is always a treat to hear when Neverwinter is used in a completely new and surprising way beyond the gaming world. Peter Gorniak, a.k.a. Sumpfork, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) joins the educators of West Nottingham Shire for crafting NWN into a tool entirely different than what BioWare expected:

I hear you are helping out with the Open Knights project; how long have you been working with them?

Peter: I've been part of the Open Knights projects since it started, and sadly seem to be the only remaining original member still active, and neveredit the only remaining active project. The good news is that Alan Schmitt has started contributing code to neveredit in the form of a conversation editor implementation, so we're back up to two active members now. I've been slowed down by my thesis work somewhat, but the end of that is now clearly in sight. If you want to help out or check it out, look at the neveredit wiki. Once my thesis is done this summer, I have big plans for neveredit, like facilities to automate module-wide changes, automatic map design, etc.

Can you tell us a little about your current school project or will you need to shoot me with some sort of mind-control ray?

Peter: I'm happy to give some pretty clear hints as to what I'm up to, especially because I don't want study participants to be under any misconceptions. I've been building intelligent machines for quite a while, and I base my work on observing and modeling human behaviour. Computer role playing games are an intriguing platform for studying people's behaviour in a socially and contextually rich setting. At the same time, they still allow you to shape the world and the interactions between people in ways such that people's behaviour does not get out of hand. That's exactly what I'm doing in this work - having players interact as they would otherwise, while solving a puzzle within Neverwinter Nights. I am putting some constraints on them by limiting their interaction somewhat, and designing a specific type of module for them to complete. And while I work on artificial intelligence related problems, I want it to be completely clear that this study involves only human participants. :)

I can't tell you the details of the current study so as to not influence participant's behaviour, but all will be published in the not-too-far future.

As I understand it, Trent Oster went down to MIT to do a talk on the history of BioWare's organization, the use of technology, and his current work. Does your project have some connection with that visit or is it just a coincidence?

Peter: I went to that meeting, and it seemed to be largely a recruiting effort directed at MIT undergrads. I did have a quick chat with Trent afterwards and just pointed him to our projects and some of the other things going on at MIT involving NWN. I do hope for more interaction between my group here and Bioware in the future.

Can you tell us how you got involved in using NWN as a source to gather specific information? Did you need to change anything fundamental about how NWN works?

Peter: I was (and still am) an avid player before I proposed it as a research platform.

Playing it, I realized that the game provided a great environment in which to study some aspects of human behaviour and a large base of already active players happy to provide data. By that time, I had already poked around with neveredit, so I knew that at least reading all the file formats would be possible. I proposed it, and proceeded to start decoding the client-server protocol byte by byte because I need to record everything that goes on in the game. That took some time and it's still not always perfect, but I get a pretty good transcript of the whole session. For the next iteration of Bioware games, I _really_ hope you build in some remote logging functionality. I asked BioWare for cooperation so that I wouldn't have to spend all this time decoding their protocol, but sadly didn't get a response back then. Otherwise, I use the game pretty much as is, with some restrictions enforced by in-game scripting (for example, in the study I'm currently running one player is not allowed to speak normally).

One other thing that I've done is implemented a way to externally drive NPCs within the game. It's a real hack, but it works surprisingly well (and again, I'm not using this functionality in the study I'm running.) Essentially, I remotely write a database file to the NWN database directory that can be read via the DB commands in NWScript. The to-be-controlled character has an immense script attached to its heartbeat - so big that the official toolset fails to compile it, but Torlack's compiler running within neveredit on Mac OS X does just fine. It reads a set of NWScript commands from the database as text, converts their arguments into the correct types, and calls the function as specified. It can even do nested function calls and such. In combination with decoding the client/server protocol, this allows me to have a character that can see everything in the game and can be told to do anything in the game, but has its brain outside of the game.

What is the Education Arcade Conference? What is your involvement there?

Peter: The Education Arcade Conference has as its topic the use of games in education, from in-classroom teaching to research use like mine. I've been asked to speak on my use of NWN in an education/research setting there, and will do so this coming Tuesday in LA. Soon after E3 I'll present a paper at a Games and AI conference that talks about some past research I've used NWN for.

About how long will you be gathering data? If I am interested where should I go to check it out?

I'll be collecting data for another little while for this round, perhaps a couple of weeks. As there are more people in our group who use NWN now, there will likely be more opportunities. Right now, you can go to my guidelines page to find out how to participate.

As a scientist, are you actually mad or only unpredictably quirky?

Peter: A different research group told me they looked at decoding the NWN client/server protocol and thought only a mad person would attempt it. So, I guess I have been scientifically (or at least by non-mad scientists) declared mad.

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