How New Gaming Company Operative Plans to Center Real Writers and Actors in Its AI-Generated Stories
New interactive storytelling company Operative Games is setting out to change the gaming industry using one of the scariest resources in entertainment: generative AI. But Operative leadership aims to approach this endeavor in partnership with creatives and talent, not in lieu of them.
Backed by investors including 1AM Gaming, Samsung Next and LongJourney.vc, the company’s goal is to create immersive games where players can “converse with genuinely thoughtful, lifelike AI characters that forge lasting emotional connections in the context of solving problems and navigating intricate stories together.” The company is run by Jon Snoddy, former head of Walt Disney Research & Development, and Kraft, founding CEO of Pandora Media, along with gaming industry vets Pegi Bryant and Tai Patwardhan.
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“We bring in real writers. We bring in people who’ve written TV series, who’ve written films. They’re the heart and soul of what we’re creating,” Kraft told Variety. “And I think that’s a big difference. When you look at other companies trying to bring AI to games, they’re trying to take a traditional game and take the non-playable characters in that game, the NPCs, and just give them some intelligence using large language models and and maybe try and be a little creative with that. But we’re fully committed to this notion of story, and to this process of bringing in just the most talented writers in the world to create those stories.”
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Per Operative, the company’s first game, “The Operative,” allows players call a character named Enya “who draws them into her world with a request for help.”
According to the description for the game, which was unveiled out of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco last month, “What seems at first like a simple ask will ultimately unfold into a complex spy thriller in which the player has a pivotal role. Enya reacts to the players’ actions and will even show real human emotions – such as annoyance – if she is contacted late at night (just like a real person would).”
Operative CEO Jon Snoddy; COO Jon Kraft/Courtesy images
“We don’t use completely AI-generated voices. We go cast in the same way you would cast an actor, and get the person that has the voice that we feel like sounds the way we want it sound, and has the acting range to be able to create that voice for us,” Snoddy said. “And then we record an insane number of lines from them at all different emotion levels and then that gets put into a computer, it grinds for days to create this model. And then we can use that in our AI system, that when the AI system speaks, it speaks through the model of their voice.”
Operative’s propriety StoryEngine “enables game developers to imbue their characters with a built-in sense of narrative and the understanding of how to take players through that narrative while allowing for full player agency.” The engine is server-based and requires no downloads.
While Operative is launching with its own original IP, Snoddy and Kraft are already in talks with major companies about creating games around well-known franchises.
“We’ve been out talking to publishers about what we’re doing, and we’re kind of amazed that every single one of them says, ‘This is different. No one else is doing this. This is amazing.’ And so we appear to have differentiated ourselves significantly from the pack there,” Snoddy said. “And it comes, I think, from that thing of saying, we’re telling stories. We want you to suspend disbelief and dive into the story. We’re not trying to convince you that all of this is real, but how you get into a book or a TV show or a movie, and you feel those emotions. They’re completely real, even though the characters are completely made up, and that’s what we’re going after here. And it’s a deeper level of storytelling that I think we’re seeing in a lot of the other things that will emerge.”
Operative plans to run on a subscription-based model that allows players to buy one series at a time in pricing comparable to your average video game, rather than the triple A titles that retail for $70 and up.
“We want you to think of this as though you’re subscribing to a great TV show or something,” Kraft said. “It comes with a different numbers of episodes and each week there’s a new episode. In each episode, it has a beginning, middle and end and it comes to a resolution. And as you narrowly escape the terrible thing that was happening, you’re celebrating that, and, oh no, something even worse is coming up for next week, and that takes off again. It’s a multi-chapter series. And we’re exploring right now how we want to do financing, but there will be a subscription series that’s not unlike what you pay for a game, not the $75 one, but the cheaper games, or what you pay for a season of a TV show. So familiar numbers there.”
Amid the ongoing actors strike against the major gaming publishers — a work stoppage led by union SAG-AFTRA that specifically centers around issues with the use of generative AI by those companies — the Operative execs broke down their approach to compensating actors for their work based on how successful each title is, and plans to pay for each use of an actors’ voice.
“We do scale the contract so that as a company is successful, as the as the game is successful, the actors who voice those characters reap that reward as well,” Snoddy said. “They’re paid, I think, quite well, industry standard rates for just the sessions. And as John mentioned, we use quite a bit of those sessions, so there’s good revenue there. But then also, as we scale, they succeed and they increase their compensation, as well.”
Kraft added: “Contractually, we set this up so that if we do want to cast them in another project, they get paid just the same as they got paid for that first project. It’s not like, ‘Well, we’ve already got your voice!’ We’re very committed to creating talent and to working closely with creative talent and making sure that they succeed where we succeed.”
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