Lucas Addresses SIGGRAPH, Calls for Increased Game AI

Though George Lucas has no planned film projects in the works, the Star Wars potentate announced at SIGGRAPH 2005 that he intends to get involved with his company's video game division. According to Reuters reports of his SIGGRAPH keynote held earlier this week in Los Angeles, Lucas indicated that he wants to work with LucasArts to improve artificial intelligence and speech recognition in games "to a point where you can talk to the game and it will talk back." Lucas hopes that advanced AI will not only make games more challenging but improve the storytelling as well. "I think that will change games from first-person shooter narratives to intelligent and challenging first-person shooter-type dramas," he said. The emphasis on improved technology in voice recognition and AI dovetails with the increased staff recently added to the company and new commitment to in-house game development. LucasArts' next confirmed game is Star Wars Battlefront II, due out in November, after which the company intends to lessen its dependence on Star Wars-based titles. Other plans outlined by Lucas for his post-Star Wars work are to improve current film editing equipment so that both audio and video can be integrated in the editing process, and to introduce CG technology into Asian film markets, as he prepares a Clone Wars-based TV series, to be created at LucasFilm's new Singapore studio. Gamasutra will continue to feature the latest product news from SIGGRAPH, and will also be debuting multiple technical and overview-based wrap-ups from the show in the near future.