Alexa-Assisted Board Game St.Noire In The Works
January 17, 2019 by brennon
We've heard of app-assisted board gaming, but how about Alexa-assisted ones? Well, X2 Games are working on one called St.Noire which has you trying to solve a murder mystery using the device.
The premise of the game is that there has been a murder in the small town of St.Noire and you and five friends will be working to solve the mystery before the killer strikes again. You have to find clues, interrogate witnesses and work out who is lying, all whilst Alexa drives the characters and world of St.Noire in the background.
This sounds like a fantastic premise and it would be brilliant to actually give this a go. Hopefully, the system will be able to live up to their claims of making games feel different, tweaking the story and its path each time to offer a variety of game experiences.
Alexa and similar pieces of tech seem to me to be a fascinating way of changing up how games are played and I could see people getting behind the idea of games like St.Noire as well as something more Fantastical too!
What do you think?
"...all whilst Alexa drives the characters and world of St.Noire in the background"
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If they can get alexa to respond in each characters’ pre-recorded voice that’d be amazing! Like an even more immersive Alexa Skyrim!
The cynic in me is waiting for the inevitable data leakage into your shopping cart, pretty cool idea even if i hate the always on spy in the room creeper tech. I think the biggest problem with using these for games is finding compatible names to invoke the smart speaker with (siri, cortana, alexa are all chosen due to the contast in phonics between each syllable, making it computationally cheap to enable listen mode to process the query), so for something more fantastical i think various trope races could prove difficult to handle, elves for example would probably cause a… Read more »
Admittedly I am a Luddite but I wonder how these games will survive as the tech they need to run becomes obsolete.
Ultimatly the hardware is irrelevant as its the software which drives it, would work as well with speech recognition enabled on a phone. The way the tech is going integration rather than descrete speakers will dominate once a prevailing format is established currently we are at the betamax vs VHS (or HD dvd vs bluray if you prefer) stage both in terms of governence {data ownership mainly, along with turning passive listening off} and common communication protocols so that the interface is separate from the service , give it a few years and it will be built into electrical fittings… Read more »
That’s true, though the sense I was aiming at is that you do get to a stage where apps no longer work on current hardware.
After a spate of more recent phones dying I dug out my oldest, an HTC One and even the web was a struggle with my antique phone mising all the modern certificates.
Mainstream apps will of course be maintained. One-offs for a boardgame? Maybe not so much. A generic version would make someone a fascinating open source project though ?
I remember a game that my parents had from long long ago titled ‘Stop Thief’ that worked with something similar in concept of being detectives and running down a criminal on a board that had no markers for where the perpetrator would be. The only clues to where the criminal was located was by sounds emitted from an electronic ‘crime scanner’ that noted what actions they took. It was all a guess as to where the thief would be from the movement and it was always different when we played. This seems like a much more involved program with the… Read more »