Reading about the way Eliza functions reminded me of the game Façade. Being my first experience interacting with characters via keyboard comments, I was really impressed by how intuitive and smart each character in the game appeared to be. I had assumed that Façade relied on a series of keywords the user might type, in order to generate those compelling responses but I didn’t realized that this type of text based interaction between the user and the computer has had such a long history. In that sense, I’m surprised by how little it has evolved within the gaming industry. I mean, side scrollers have evolved into completely 3D landscapes, sprite based games have evolved into full scale, open world games and point and click shooters have evolved into well, shooter games. I’m just surprised to see that text based games seem to have remained stagnant in that sense. I wonder if this is because of the more graphical nature of the other gaming types mentioned. I mean, though all of those games have evolved graphically, conceptually they are still the same at their core.
I think that maybe because text based character games like Eliza rely on the one on one dialogue between the AI and the player, an evolution for the form hasn’t emerged in the same way as the other forms of games. I mean, now we have voice acting but unless the technology behind voice commands and reading them evolves in a more intuitive way then typing things on your keyboard or selecting text through your game pad, I don’t see the genre really moving forward. Also, because character and user interaction with said character is important, I think it would be a lot harder to make a game with a variety of characters—with their own personality and ticks—within such games. RPGs and dialogue based games try to flesh out their characters, and do so more than other games, but at the same time they are not nearly as intelligent or unique as characters like Eliza are.
