At one point, my ship is intercepted and disabled by a villain, who pops onto my screen and starts grilling me. After a little back and forth, it turns out he wants a deal: "Tell you what, you take me to the Delta outpost and I'll let you live."

I try to shift into character. "What if I attack you?" I say. No response, just an impassive-yet-expectant stare. "What if I say no?" I add. I try half a dozen responses but -- perhaps because I'm playing an early build of the game or maybe it just can't decipher my voice -- I can't seem to find the right phrase to unlock the next stage of play.

It's awkward. My immersion in the game all but breaks down when my conversational partner does not reciprocate. It's a two-way street: If I'm going to dissect the game's dialogue closely to craft an interesting point, it has to keep up with mine too.

The situation deteriorates. The villain eventually gets fed up with my inability to carry the conversation. He blows up my ship, ending the game.

Yet there is potential for a natural back and forth conversation with characters. There are over 50 possible responses to one simple question from the sergeant -- "Is there anything you'd like to know before we start the mission?" -- says Alexander Mejia, the founder and creative director at Human Interact, which is designing the game. The system is powered by Microsoft's Custom Speech Service (similar technology to Cortana), which sends players' voice input to the cloud, parses it for true intent, and gets a response in milliseconds. Smooth voice control coupled with virtual reality means a completely hands-free, lifelike interface with almost no learning curve for someone who's never picked up a gamepad.

Speaking certainly feels more natural than selecting one of four dialogue options from a menu, as a traditional roleplaying game might provide. It makes me more attentive in conversation -- I have to pay attention to characters' monologues, picking up on details and inconsistencies while coming up with insightful questions that might take me down a serendipitous narrative route (much like real life). No, I don't get to precisely steer a ship to uncharted planets since voice control, after all, is not ideal for navigating physical space. But what this game offers instead is conversational exploration.

Video games have always been concerned with blurring the lines between art and real life.

Photorealistic 4K graphics, the disintegration of levels into vast open worlds, virtual reality placing players inside the skull of another person: The implicit goal of every gaming advance seems to be to create an artificial reality indistinguishable from our own. Yet we communicate with these increasingly intelligent games using blunt tools. The joystick/buttons and keyboard/mouse combinations we use to speak to games do little to resemble the actions they represent. Even games that use lifelike controls from the blocky plastic Time Crisis guns to Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons still involve scrolling through menus and clicking on dialogue options. The next step is for us to talk to games.

While games that use the voice have cropped up over the years -- Seaman on Sega's Dreamcast, Lifeline on the PlayStation 2, Mass Effect 3 on the Xbox 360's Kinect -- their commands were often frustratingly clunky, and audio input never seemed more than a novelty.

That may be coming to an end. Well-rated audio games have appeared on the iPhone such as Papa Sangre and Zombies, Run! At E3 this month, Dominic Mallinson, a Sony senior vice president for research and development, referred to natural language understanding among "some of the technologies that really excite us in the lab right now."

More than anything, the rush by Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Apple to dominate digital assistants is pushing the entire voice computing field forward. In March, The Information reported that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wants gaming to be a "killer app" for Alexa, and the company has paid developers that produce the best performing skills. Games are now the top category for Alexa, and the number of customers playing games on Echo devices has increased tenfold in the last year, according to an Amazon spokeswoman. "If I think back on the history of the world, there's always been games," says Paul Cutsinger, Amazon's head of Alexa voice-design education. "And it seems like the invention of every new technology comes along with games."

"It seems like the invention of every new technology comes along with games." - Paul Cutsinger, Amazon

Simply: If voice assistants become the next major computing platform, it's logical that they will have their own games. "On most new platforms, games are one of the first things that people try," says Aaron Batalion, a partner focused on consumer technology at venture-capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners. "It's fun, engaging and, depending on the game mechanics, it's often viral." According to eMarketer, 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-assistant device like Echo at least once a month this year, while 60.5 million Americans will use some kind of virtual voice assistant like Siri. The question is, what form will these new games take?

Gaming skills on Alexa today predominantly trace their lineage to radio drama -- the serialized voice-acted fiction of the early 20th century -- including RuneScape whodunnit One Piercing Note, Batman mystery game The Wayne Investigation and Sherlock Holmes adventure Baker Street Experience.

Earplay, meanwhile, has emerged as a leading publisher of audio games, receiving over $10,000 from Amazon since May, according to Jon Myers, who co-founded the company in 2013. Myers describes their work as "stories you play with your voice," and the company crafts both their own games and the tools that enable others to do the same.

For instance, in Codename Cygnus, you play a James Bond-esque spy navigating foreign locales and villains with contrived European accents, receiving instructions via an earpiece. Meanwhile, in Half, you navigate a surreal Groundhog Day scenario, picking up clues on each playthrough to escape the infinitely repeating sequence of events.

"What you see with the current offerings from Earplay springs a lot out of what we did at Telltale Games over the last decade."

Like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, these experiences intersperse chunks of narrative with pivotal moments where the player gets to make a decision, replying with verbal prompts. Plot the right course through an elaborate dialogue tree and you reach the end. The audio storytelling activates your imagination, yet there is little agency as a player: The story chugs along at its own pace until you reach each waypoint. You are not so much inhabiting a character or world as co-authoring a story with a narrator.

"What you see with the current offerings from Earplay springs a lot out of what we did at Telltale Games over the last decade," says Dave Grossman, Earplay's chief creative officer. "I almost don't even want to call them games. They're sort of interactive narrative experiences or narrative games."

Grossman has had a long career considering storytelling in games. He is widely credited with creating the first game with voice acting all the way through -- 1993's Day of the Tentacle -- and also worked on the Monkey Island series. Before arriving at Earplay, he spent a decade with Telltale Games, makers of The Wolf Among Us and The Walking Dead.

Earplay continues this genre's bloodline: The goal is not immersion but storytelling. "[Immersion] is an excellent thing for getting the audience involved in what you want, in making them care about it, but I don't think it's the be-all-end-all goal of all gaming," says Grossman. "My primary goal is to entertain the audience. That's what I care most about, and there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve immersing them in anything."

"My primary goal is to entertain the audience ... There are lots of ways to do that that don't involve immersing them in anything."

In Earplay's games, the "possibility space"-- the degree to which the user can control the world -- is kept deliberately narrow. This reflects Earplay's philosophy. But it also reflects the current limitations of audio games. It's hard to explore physical environments in detail because you can't see them. Because Alexa cannot talk and listen at the same time, there can be no exchange of witticisms between player and computer, only each side talking at preapproved moments. Voice seems like a natural interface, but it's still essentially making selections from a multiple-choice menu. Radio drama may be an obvious inspiration for this new form; its overacted tropes and narrative conventions are also well-established for audiences. But right now, like radio narratives, the experience of these games seem to still be more about listening than speaking.