Posted by Michael on May 1st, 2006, in Development
As Animal Crossing shows us very convincingly, making the player like the autonomous characters, already gets you halfway towards making the player believe them. This seems related to what Richard Evans once said about the creature in Black and White: one of the three design goals for the A.I. was to make the creature loveable.
It appears that the “willingness” aspect of the proverbial “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” that is required for the audience to enjoy fiction, is often underrated. Surely a lot can be done in the design of both the appearance and the behaviour of the characters in a game, to increase this willingness in the player. One powerful means towards this, is to make the characters loveable, cute, attractive, charming.
Perhaps this is where The Sims fail most of the time: the characters seem to be too selfish, greedy and nasty to develop any feelings for.
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Posted by Michael on April 25th, 2006, in Development
Penny Baillie-de Byl summarizes the reasons why we do things as a force of nature. Nature (which almost sounds like “god” in her exposition) wants us to do certain things (namely survive as individuals and survive as species). To make sure that we do these things, nature rewards us when we do them. The rewards come in the release of chemicals in our bodies that make us feel good. A long time ago, and for a very long time, hunting and gathering were necessary for survival. This is why nature rewards us when we hunt or gather.
While hunting and gathering has disappeared as an activity for most people, the natural reward system is still in place. This is why we experience pleasure when we play games.
Anyway, disregarding whether this is a satisficatory explanation of human behaviour, it struck me that it might be a plausible model for the behaviour of autonomous characters.
I’m always interested in finding ways to concentrate on the ear when trying to paint an eye (Kees Vollemans). So rather than starting from the individual’s motivations, drives, preferences and moods to make a character act autonomously, we could play nature and build a reward system for NPCs. Something like a list of actions that we want the NPC to perform. And for each action that it performs, it gets a number of pleasure points. That way, a characters only needs one motivation: to gain pleasure points.
To differentiate personalities, this list of actions, and the points awarded for performing them, could be slightly different for each character. The list should also probably be dynamic. So we can change it from above if we want a certain thing to happen. Or to prevent a character from continuously doing the same thing to increase its pleasure points. Perhaps the number of points that the NPC gets for performing a certain action is relative to the amount of time that has elapsed since it last performed the action. That way each time an action is performed, the number of points decreases. But over time, the award increases.
It’s scary to reduce human behaviour to such mechanistic systems. But that is not the point. We don’t want to create autonomous organisms. We don’t want to recreate human individuals. We want to create characters whose behaviour has a dramatic and emotional effect on the player in the context of a narrative environment.
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Posted by Michael on April 22nd, 2006, in Development
When modeling a character in 3D, we have often felt the inclination to model it in a realistic way. Even though we know that a certain level of stylisation is much more desirable for our games. The same applies for natural effects in real-time. When trying to show rain, the urge to draw every raindrop is great, even though in the most realistic of media (film), raindrops can hardly be seen.
A similar thing seems to happen when creating autonomous characters. It is very easy to fall into the trap of realism: to analyze human behaviour, break it apart and put it back together.
This reminds me of an imaginary machine I invented as a child to prove or disprove the existance of the supernatural. It was basically a xerox machine for humans, inspired by teleportation. The idea was to analyze the human to be transported down to the level of atoms and then recreate him or her exactly with “off the shelf” atoms. If this copy had a soul, the existance of the supernatural would be disproven. 🙂
A similar thing happens with AI that attempts to be naturalistic: it breaks apart human behaviour and then puts it back together. And in the end result something seems to be missing: the soul is gone! With Drama Princess, we should attempt to create the illusion of the existance of a soul, an not the soul-less copy of a human organism.
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