Bossa’s Faliszek: ‘Other developers are never ever the competition’

Chet Faliszek and his team at Bossa Studios are hard at work reinventing games narrative through artificial intelligence and it sounds like the technology they’re creating could be made available to other developers interested in experimenting with it. Faliszek has an incredibly open philosophy towards the games development community that was born out of working with virtual reality, a notoriously experimental and open clique.

“One of the things I’ve loved working within the VR space is how sharing all the developers have been,” Faliszek says. “They really tried to help each other and push VR forward. So we’re kind of using that model here. I don’t know exactly what the end form of this technology is, there’s no promises with this. But the idea being that we’re going to be open about the development, the tools we’re using, how we’re doing it and seeing if other people can do it.”

The triple-A games industry can be frustratingly secretive, but one of the best ways for developers – and therefore games – to improve is for people to talk, Faliszek argues.

“I’m a big fan of thinking that other developers are never ever the competition, because you never own 50% of the market of anything,” he says. “Maybe PUBG’s getting close… It just doesn’t pay off to behave that way. I’ve already privately pitched this to a dozen developers, just to get feedback. What am I missing, what aren’t we thinking of? And always, every single person, I’ve learned something from.

“What we’re making is one approach and I think it’s an interesting one to go down. It will be interesting to see if it inspires other people to try different attempts at this and what comes from that. And that’s why we’re open with other developers about it.”

We’ll have more from Chet Faliszek on narrative AI in games, automatic pipelines and whether artificial intelligences can procreate in our full feature in the coming days.