“It is our claim that the best way to include [activities] is for there to be actual ‘activity-things’, non-physical entities with their own state and internal logic to them, existing in the game world. Based on their state, they influence the behaviour of the agents within them, and based on what happens, they change their state.”
By Richard Evans and Thomas Barnet Lamb, Social Activities: Implementing Wittgenstein
While Richard Evans’ work will probably always allow his characters to have more individuality than we need them to have for our purposes, the idea expressed above, connects very nicely to our ideas of Usage instructions, AI from the outside and Modeling relationships. We have developed a preference for designing the things between the characters rather than what happens inside of them. The viewer can only perceive the outside anyway, the things that are expressed. Social activities are a prime example of how individual autonomous agents can be directed as a group. They don’t need individual minds to make decisions. Mr. Evans would not go this far because he wants his simulations to really work. While we only care about the illusion that takes place in the player’s mind.
The use of Finite State Machines to define these group activities, as suggested by Richard Evans, is fascinating and definitely something to keep in mind when the time comes to design Drama Princess.
Posted on May 13, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Apparently, whether AI should be outside or inside the mind of the characters (our terms) has been somewhat of an argument in academic circles, if we can believe the Wikipedia page about Hubert Dreyfus, one of the inspirations mentioned by Richard Evans. I wonder if any other researchers besides him have followed up on Mr. Dreyfus’ (and Heidegger’s) criticism and attempted to build an AI that started from the social context rather than the individual’s mind.
And to think we only came up with this because we were lazy. 😉
Posted on May 15, 2006 at 12:09 am
[…] One of the characters in our virtual space, however, will be the avatar of the spectator. Contrary to the Non Playing Characters (NPCs), the behaviour of this character will be controlled by a human. This means that we cannot use the concept of “activity-things” (Richard Evans) for these interactions. It seems that we will not be able to cheat as much when the spectator knows what is going on in the mind of one of the participants. […]