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Written by B. Kaveh
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Wednesday, 17 June 2009 |
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There’s been a lot of talk about Morality in games, and the argument boils down to two basic schools: One group think that developing a sense of morals is the ultimate goal of games, and even all arts, while the other group (and sadly, that’s the majority of developers) believe that morality is better left to other media, or maybe even best kept at a personal level, while creating “fun” should be the holy grail of games. I think I gave away my point of view right there: I believe that a great game will and should make the player a better person. In this article I will talk about the factors that have so far kept us from creating a coherent and deeply engaging morality system, and how we might be able to do better.
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Written by B. Kaveh
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Monday, 09 March 2009 |
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In part one of this series, “Defining Emergence and Complexity in Video Games” , I tried to define the concepts of complex systems and emergent behavior and how they apply to video games. I also tried to convince you that “emergence” is a good thing in games, and that it is worthwhile to consider designing your games so that there is a minimal chance of “benevolent” emergence to appear. Now it is time to introduce a number of techniques to assess whether your designed game will allow for emergence, and how you can try to maximize the “potential” for emergence to occur…
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Written by B. Kaveh
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Sunday, 22 February 2009 |
Interactive storytelling has been a buzzword in many conferences on gaming lately, and we are to thank Chris Crawford for that. Unfortunately, despite some claims of developers of getting closer to that holy grail of interactivity, any effort in the right direction has been negligible, in part due to the vague definition of what the term “interactive storytelling” encapsulates. For example, it is obvious that there cannot be a story without “agents making intelligent choices”, i.e. if all our agents would make random decisions on their next actions, stories won’t develop. On the other hand, how “intelligent” do our story characters really need to be? This is where opinions start to diverge greatly, and the answer really depends on the type of game wherein interactive storytelling is to be embedded.
In this article I will try to offer my view of what interactive storytelling is, how it ties into the modeling of human-like AI agents and discuss the three main approaches to human behavior modeling that are being researched nowadays.
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Written by B. Kaveh
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Saturday, 21 February 2009 |
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I finally had some time to play some of the “weirder” games out there…and I must say I found a favorite: Dwarf Fortress! It is hard to believe that an ASCII-based simulation can offer so much depth in gameplay. If I was to pick only one factor that distinguishes DF from other games (besides the obvious “geek appeal” its MS-DOS style interface creates) it would have to be the emergent, very complex interactions that the dwarves have with each other and their environment. In this article I will discuss the concepts of complexity and emergence using DF and other games as examples...
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Written by B. Kaveh
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Wednesday, 15 October 2008 |
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It is hard to define “intelligence” let alone “artificial intelligence”, and though there is plenty of disagreement on the two terms among cognitive science researchers, game developers seem to have reached a mutual agreement on what AI means within the context of games. Among game developers, and most people who play video games, good AI is defined by its ability to come up with strategies for winning a game that offers a large set of possible decisions, in a way that a human opponent would. Here we will be discussing the “human” element of AI behavior in games...
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I would definitely get my hands on th...