Non-Player Characters and Artificial Intelligence

København: Danmarks Design Skole. København, 2009

This article intends to sketch a theory of the player drawing from psychological personality theories (Assagioli's Psychosynthesis), neurophysiologic studies (Damasio and Pert) and previous work on player's theory with the purpose of tracing a functional procedure for designing game worlds. I will make use of the concept of sub-personalities to show how potentially, all player-types coexist within the implied player. Once player types are individuated I intend to show how a "flow" path for each one of them can be planned and included during the design phase of game worlds.

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2010

This article analyses the concept of agency in Computer Role-Playing Game narratives, with a focus on the characters ostensibly not under player control that populate these fictions. Specifically, there is a tendency for players to attribute agency to such characters, and this attribution is core to the imaginative process that brings such games to life.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Video games can deeply engage players using characters that appear to have emotionally-driven behaviours. One way that developers encode and carry knowledge between projects is by creating development tools, allowing them to focus on how they use that knowledge and create new knowledge. This work draws from software engineering to propose three methods for creating development tools for game characters "with emotion": a process for analyzing academic emotion literature so that the tool's functions are plausible with respect to real-life emotion; a process for translating academic emotion literature into mathematical notation; and a process for creating tests to evaluate these kinds of development tools using narrative characters. The development of an example tool for creating game characters "with emotion", EMgine, demonstrates these methods and serves as an example of good development practices.

Massively multiuser online games such as World of Warcraft employ computer controlled non-player characters and quest activities extensively in training/tutoring capacities. This approach is very effective and popular, incorporating active learning, incremental progress, and creative repetition. This paper explores ways to exploit this model in educational virtual environments. Non-player characters in such environments require a knowledge model, a dialogue model, and a user performance model, in addition to any physical and behavioral traits necessary to make them interesting and credible members of the environment.

2007

The basic idea of game-based learning is the fusion of fun and learning by using the motivational potential of video games in the educational context. Thus, the design of an educational game should be adaptive not only to the learner's cognitive abilities, but also to the individual preferences of the player. Especially the design of the non-player character (NPC) that takes the role of a teacher by providing guidance, hints, and companionship seems of crucial importance. The presented study addresses to three design question with respect to an optimal NPC-design, namely the NPC's personality as well as the role of naturalism and color. Based on media equation and related research several hypotheses were derived. Independent variables were the NPC's personality (funny & friendly vs. severe & unfriendly), color (black & white vs. colored design), and naturalism (naturalistic vs. comic-like appearance), resulting in a 2 x 2 x 2-design. By means of eight different NPC-versions the players had to rate and indicate which of the versions they prefer for an NPC that provides guidance and companionship in an educational adventure-game. Dependent measurements include the selection of the preferred NPC as well as an NPC-rating. The results of the used ²-tests indicate a clear preference for a colored, naturalistic NPC-design. For the NPC's personality the pupils favor a personality that was similar to their own, indicating similarityattraction. Further results and implications for the design of educational games will be discussed.

In recent years there has been significant improvement in the simpler actions performed by characters in computer games -such as navigating the world and attacking enemies and similar actions. In previous work, the ability of NPCs to adapt to changing circumstances was found to be inadequate in many circumstances. In order to validate these findings we have studied a total of 20 games, observing NPC behavior in each of the games in many different situations, ranging from everyday town life to combat. Using the Game Agent Matrix, we found a number of different behavior categories related to the social context of the agent and its behavior within that context indicating a gap between the most convincing behavior was focused around navigating the world, using tools and using language, as well as more complex behavior such as social sanctions and ranking, connected to the narrative of the game. The middle ground, containing behaviors such as dynamic group formation and the ability to perceive the actions of others were generally seen as unconvincing.

Proc. 3rd Digital Games Research Association International Conference, 2007

Descriptions of humans require several qualities for people to experience them as believable: human body; selfawareness, intentional states, and self impelled actions; expression of emotions; ability to use natural language; and persistent traits. Based on these we analyze non-player character Claudette Perrick in The Elders Scroll IV:

Procedia Computer Science, 2019

Game education is a game that aims for educational and entertainment. But the educational game is not popular to users. Therefore, it takes innovation and other ways to improve the educational game itself. Based on the current user survey, games that have dynamic elements such as artificial intelligence are sufficiently requested by users. For this reason, this study aims to build educational games that implement artificial intelligent (AI). In a game, AI is often implemented as Non-Player Character (NPC). The method used for NPCs in this game is based on the Natural Language Processing approach. This is so that the NPC can answer questions about English automatically. The results show that the educational game that has this NPC gets an average score above 75% of users. In addition, users also provide positive feedback on the game itself apart from the questionnaire. So it can be concluded that the presence of NPCs in educational games can increase user interest. With this new approach, it is hoped that it can also increase the popularity ranking of the educational game genre.

Contemporary Advancements in Information Technology Development in Dynamic Environments

Virtual game worlds of today set new standards of quality for computer graphics, physical engines, game design, and artificial intelligence systems. Virtual worlds are often inhabited both by human-controlled and AI-controlled characters (NPCs), playing key roles in the game environment, so poor AI can be a major negative factor, breaking user immersion. For AI systems controlling human-like NPCs, it is especially important to ensure believability and effectiveness, i.e. human-likeness of character behavior and the ability of NPCs to achieve their own goals. The importance of believable and effective AI as a major game "fun factor" is well known, but the growing complexity of game worlds also needs to be supported with complex NPC behavior, not always achievable with traditional game AI methods. In the present work we examine the concepts of believability and effectiveness of game AI, and analyze several successful attempts to create modern AI systems that meet these criteria. We note the diversity of approaches that include "faking" human behavior with ad-hoc algorithms, the use of cognitive systems based on models of mind, and data-driven approaches, relying on knowledge bases, created by observing actual human behavior patterns. We also examine a case study showing that believable and effective behavior can be achieved through learning behavioral patterns from observation with subsequent automatic selection of effective acting strategies.