Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s quite warm here this morning for the first time in days and I was dangerously close to enjoying the sun’s gentle caress, which would be a terrible betrayal of mistress moon. Thankfully I keep a stock of chilly and chilling games behind glass for just such an eventuality and today I’ve broken out The Snowfield, from brainy chaps at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, whose output we’ve covered previously. This third-person adventure runs in browsers through the magic of Unity and it’s quite conventional to play in some ways, though shot through with atmospheric and narrative weirdness. Best to play it rather than listen to me, or read a little more in the icy depths below.

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The Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab is intended for clever types to make clever games, and look, they done gone done that with Improviso. It’s a 2D multiplayer acting game, where you take on a role, play it, improvise, and use your own dialogue chat and even props in the game world. A neat enough idea, but the actual purpose of the game is a bit deeper, as Gambit explain: “The longer term goal is to train an AI system with data collected from thousands of people telling stories together with the same characters, sets, and props. Once trained, this AI system will be able to play the role of one or more characters that can converse and interact with other AI- or human-controlled characters.”

Makes you wonder how many other games could actually be crowd-training AI for specific tasks. Anyway, go take a look.