Square Enix fans aren’t pleased with machine learning test

Square Enix recently released a free game on Steam called “Square Enix Test Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case.” This remake of a 1983 text-based adventure game used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to fix what the publishers saw as limitations in the game’s original input-based gameplay. However, users aren’t happy with this new feature, to put it mildly.

NLP is a form of artificial intelligence that helps machines understand natural or conversational language. Reviews of the game show that Portopia, on the other hand, is not a good demonstration of this tech, if only because it doesn’t seem to understand natural language. This would seem to indicate that, even if AI and NLP can be used in games, it’s not yet at the point where it should be — at least with regards to how much agency its creator is willing to give the player.