Posted by Michael on May 12th, 2006, in Books

This book reminds me a bit of those manuals with instructions on how to make love to women. To a man, it all sounds like such a hassle 😉 : she has to be in the right mood, and you have to have foreplay and you have to find some tiny nerve center, not to mention a secret zone hidden inside and then you have to make sure that you don’t come first. A hassle! No wonder men have sex with other men all the time instead! 😉

Seriously, I imagine that most male programmers who read Mrs Ray’s recommendations sigh and groan to the tought of having to take all the things into account that females apparently need in games (female -but no “hypersexualised”- avatars, emotional involvement, non-confrontational competition, short play times, etc). Much like they would if they were to read a sex manual.
Yet many of them have sex with women regularly. And I bet many of these women don’t dislike it most of the time. So surely, there must be different ways to stimulate a man into pleasuring a woman better.

Because that’s what games have in common with sex, right? Pleasure.

Anyway.
Most things that Mrs Ray mentions sound simply like recommendations for good design to me. And not terribly gender-specific. I know many men who enjoy the elements in games that are considered typically female in the book. Good design is well-balanced per definition. And that includes gender-balanced.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that current computer games are heavily biased towards excessively male play-features. I find this odd. I don’t think that I know any design discipline that is so gender-biased. Most chairs fit both male and female buttocks! And if there is a gender-bias, like in fashion, it usually doesn’t mean that there is no equivalent for the other gender (although one could argue that the male equivalent of fashion is often of much lower artistic quality than its female counterpart).

So Sheri Graner Ray does have a point. The extreme one-sidedness of game design is very problematic. I personally find design with an extreme gender bias simply bad design. And I (even though I am a man) would love to see many more of those supposedly feminine features in games. So I applaud the effort the book makes to try and convince game designers to include women in their target audience (if only for profit). I’m just not sure if it has the right tone. It does put the problem on the agenda. As an economic issue more so than an artistic one. So perhaps it is making a difference already.

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Posted by Michael on May 5th, 2006, in Books

This book starts a very optimistic description of the current use of story and characters in games, pretending that narrative in games is on the same level as in popular cinema or even Shakespeare. It goes on to map the existing formulas that make Hollywood films so boring and predictable exciting onto games, pretending that running around shooting monsters is a viable way of telling stories. If you are happy with the way current games are made and you need a formula how to make one exactly like that, this is a book for you. At least if you can stand the “trendy” cut-everything-into-bitesize-chunks layout.

Later in the book, the writers come to their senses a bit an allow some doubt to trickle through. Here and there you find suggestions that perhaps maybe there is still a lot of work to do for games to become a mature medium. But they are very careful to leave all of these questions very open, as they hide behind a few quotes from game celebreties. Perhaps the sequel will be good.

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Posted by Michael on April 25th, 2006, in Books

With a title like that, it was hard to resist this book in the context of Drama Princess.
The enthusiasm tempered somewhat, after reading the first quarter of the book, because the target audience is clearly programmers, and not designers. Also, the focus is on NPCs as opponents to the player rather than elements in a narrative.

The book goes on to summarize the diverse techniques that games have borrowed from A.I. to build NPCs without becoming overly ambitious anywhere. It really is not much more than a very comprehensive first step towards programming NPCs the traditional way. The book virtually exclusively focusses on characters in games that behave like the player, either as opponents or partners. It also exclusively deals with classic A.I. concepts and not with any from the more “behaviorist” side of the A.I. spectrum, which seems more suitable for our goals.

That last chapter of the book deals with something closer to home: Creating Believable Non-Player Characters in which finally the distinction is made between provable intelligence and the perception of intelligence, or believability. Which is ultimately the only thing that matters, in my opinion.

Disappointingly but not unexpectedly, the writer immediately jumps to the common conlusion:

To truly create an NPC with believable autonomy, interaction, and presence we must focus on the development op the NPC’s mind because it is the essence of behavior that needs to be captured.

Obviously, we disagree. Not necessarily with her conclusion but with the supposed obviousness of it. Since all we care about is the perception of the player, surely expressing is more important than capturing. And why would the mind be the essence of one’s behaviour anyway?

Next she quotes Loyall’s requirements for believability in an artificial being (also quoted by Michael Mateas):

• personality
• emotion
• self-motivation
• change
• social relationships
• the illusion of life

Overall, this is a very interesting book for programmers who want to create NPCs for contemporary games. It covers all the tried and true systems and you can sort of pick what you need. It lacks optimisation routines and cheap tricks. So, despite of the exercises, it still remains very theoretical.

For designers or programmers unsatisfied with NPCs in contemporary games, this book doesn’t have much to offer, apart from giving one a sense of what’s out there. There’s no new ideas in the book or inspiring points of view.

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Posted by Michael on April 23rd, 2006, in Books

This is a collection of essays by many game developers. I have just started reading it but I have already discovered that our preference for “faking” the intelligence of our autonomous characters is not a new approach. It seems very common practice in games. At least in theory. In practice, it does seem that developers, being engineers, I guess, easily fall for the seduction of scientific AI. And since what they are making is just a game, the risk exists that they end up with “fake AI”, rather than “fake intelligence”.
Anyway, so far this book has been a very inspiring read, if only because of the many small practical tips.

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Posted by Michael on April 22nd, 2006, in Books

I chose this book to begin our research because it seemed like an easy and general introduction to some concepts in artificial intelligence. And indeed it was.
The focus of the book was very heavily on academic artificial intelligence and its potential and not so much on the pseudo-AI that we are more interested in.

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