Before I fell to the FedEx metaphor, I was thinking about how the game AI for every NPC would be handling the stack of states an NPC would be in. The different states would have different priorities, for example, an attack threatens the life of the NPC and thus must be reacted to before opening the door for the player. I toyed around with some perlish syntax then, mostly like grepping through the "history of events" for that NPC, to simulate memories for that NPC.

If this memory concept is used (which I'm not really sure of), then some language extension that makes searching through the memories easy would be quite necessary, as almost all AI code will be actions based on memory and the current game situation. In that case, either a specialized object (for Python or Java) or some mutation of Perl (m// matches on NPC memory instead of STDIN) could make sense to ease the use of the scripting stuff.