Once again, Dave is heading to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco and once again he will be helping run the AI Summit as a presentation of the AI Game Programmers Guild.
Dave's sessions for the 2010 GDCAI Summit have been posted. In addition to being one of the two Summit Advisors this year (along with Steve Rabin), Dave will be giving a joint lecture with Kevin Dill, participating in a panel, and giving a 5-minute "rant". The session details are below.
Session Description The 'if/then' statement has been the workhorse of decision modeling longer than digital computing. Unfortunately, the harsh transition from yes to no often expresses itself through behavior in ways that are just as harsh. Utility theory has roots in areas such as psychology, economics, sociology, and classical game theory. By applying the science of utility theory with algorithmic techniques such as response curves, population distributions, and weighted randoms, we can improve the modeling of the underlying brain of our agents, broaden the potential decision space, and even manage edge cases that other decision systems stumble over.
Idea Takeaway This lecture explains the underpinnings of utility theory, and shows concrete examples of how to leverage it using the power of other algorithmic techniques regardless of the overall structure being used for the agent AI.
Session Description Often one of the most important issues an AI programmer needs to address is the decision of which architecture to use. This choice lays the foundation for the rest of the project both enabling and limiting choices down the road. With myriad (and even conflicting) pro and con arguments for all the major AI architectures, it can be difficult to determine which one is right for a given project. This panel approaches this issue from a unique perspective. With one person acting as an advocate for each of the popular AI architectures, the panel will be presented with hypothetical game examples and asked to explain why their method is the right tool for the job and why others are not.
Idea Takeaway While this session is likely to get playfully adversarial, the attendee will be given not only a better understanding of the pros and cons of each of the types, but witness some of the thought processes that must occur when deciding on an AI architecture.
Microtalks - AI Devs Rant! Speaker: Borut Pfeifer (Freelance Game Programmer/Designer, Plush Apocalypse Productions), Dave Mark (President and Lead Designer, Intrinsic Algorithm), Adam Russell(Games Studio Manager and Lecturer, University of Derby), Kevin Dill (Software Engineer, Lockheed Martin), Steve Rabin (Principal Software Engineer, Nintendo of America), John Funge (Head of Game Platforms, Netflix) Date/Time: TBD Experience Level: Intermediate Summit: AI Summit Format: 60-minute Lecture
Session Description Sometimes things just need to be said. Saying them out loud in a room filled with (hopefully) like-minded people just makes it all the more interesting and cathartic. Seven AI developers from all corners of the industry will deliver quick, to-the-point rants about what's on their mind. Topics include AI design and programming, working with other portions of the dev team, working with academia, the perception of game AI by the public, scripting languages, and even those scary floating point numbers! Whoever said AI programmers only sit with their heads down over their keyboards?
Idea Takeaway Find out what's on the minds of AI developers in a fast-paced, fun, yet hopefully not controversy-rife session!
The GDC folks have put up the main page for the AI Summit at the 2010 GDC. This year, I am listed as a Summit Advisor alongside Steve Rabin. While I helped out a lot last year, I wasn't listed as an official advisor. That makes for a wonderful honor. I'm so pleased to be working with all the great people in the AI Game Programmers Guild to put this event on.
As a speaker at GDC Austin, I was invited by Level 3 to sit on their “Red Couch” for a video interview. Because they are an internet backbone provider, their whole take is how connectivity over the net enables “stuff”. I tweaked my spiel accordingly. It’s only about 5 minutes long.
Takeaway This lecture shows examples of some of the aspects of PvP games that are attractive to players, the AI techniques that can be used to replicate them, and the effect that inclusion of these aspects can have in an MMO environment. The attendee will leave with a variety of concepts that can be included in their own MMO designs.
Session Description Historically, PvE AI in MMOs has been a straight-forward affair. While this leads to predictability, it also leads to monotony. In online, team-based PvP games, however, much of the attraction is the dynamic nature of the engagement that necessitates that players read, communicate, and react appropriately to changing, even unexpected actions of their enemies. By leveraging more advanced techniques that are becoming common in FPS, RPG, and RTS games, the AI in MMOs can be designed to provide some of the more attractive and engaging elements of PvP games. This, in turn, can lead to more involved team play, greater replayability, and an increased sense of community in the game.
I will be speaking at the 2009 Austin GDC, September 15-18. Rather than the broad-based coverage of the GDC, the Austin GDC is more tailored to online games. In that vein, I will be doing a 1-hour lecture entitled "Cover Me!: Promoting MMO Player Interaction through Advanced AI".
Laurie and Dave arrived back from San Francisco early Monday morning. (Gotta love delayed flights... someone should make a game about that!) The week was an adventure for sure. You can read more about the AI portions of it over at IA on AI.
There may be a shift in direction (and momentum) for Airline Traffic Manager coming up. We are going to be doing some experimentation with a new approach for the client development. The current MFC-based client was our bottleneck for development and it was meant to be a throw-away interface anyway. Changing this direction on things may be just what we need to spring-board ATM's progress forward.
Additionally, we may have decided on the route we are taking for distribution eventually. We need to investigate more. Check back for details! (Remember to subscribe to this blog for news updates as they happen.)
Dave and Laurie are in San Francisco this week for the Game Developers Conference. One of the major events this week is the AI Summit at which Dave is giving https://www.cmpevents.com/GD09/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=8483 and sitting on a panel. Of course, the debut of Dave's book, "Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI" on the Expo floor will be a nice touch as well.
Keep an eye here and on the sister blog, IA on AI, for updates and observations from the show. It should be a heckuva week!
It's official, folks... Intrinsic Algorithm's Dave Mark is participating at the new AI Summit at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. Read more about it here.
Well, I had to push the decision back and back and back... but it looks like I won't be able to attend the AIIDE conference this year. I had been planning on doing it and was really looking forward to it as well. However, a combination of factors ranging from family to business (to the fact that my Cubs will probably will be in the World Series that week) are going to prevent me from attending.
Not only will I miss the tons of valuable material that is going to be presented there, I was looking forward to meeting and having conversations with a number of my peers. I will certainly see most of them at the GDC next March, though!
Just as a follow-up, here's the slides from Ben Sawyer's lecture "Serious Games Taxonomy" (pdf file) from the GDC "Serious Games Summit". I put some brief notes about it in this post. It's 54 pages/slides long and there's a lot of great information in there about the the serious games space is expanding into many directions.
Ok... here's some fun. I had 10 minutes worth of video recording on my digital camera. I figured I'd see if I could walk the GDC show floor in 10 minutes just for the heck of it. I almost made it!
You can't really see too much detail, of course, and it does tend to make you nauseous to watch since I was moving at quite a clip. Anyway, it is meant for amusement only.
Now imagine this... the career pavilion, where people were trying to drum up jobs, was a completely different room about the same size. Lots of business getting done at GDC this year!
I'm gradually getting caught up with all my GDC-related stuff. I have a stack of business cards that almost didn't fit under the seat in front of me on the plane, tons of notes to sift through, etc. Oh yeah... AND I had to get back in sync with the real world such as it is in the Central time zone.
For those that haven't glanced at IA on AI lately, the AI-related posts about GDC are going there. One is Soren Johnson's lecture on his Civ 4 AI. The other is my (audio) interview with John Abercrombie of 2K Boston about the AI he did for Bioshock. There will be more as I wade through all my notes and memories of the last week. Specifically, I need to touch on Ray Kurzweil's keynote, Damian Isla's lecture on the Halo 3 AI, my brief interview with the guys from Kynogon about Kynapse 5, and my recap of the annual AI programmers' dinner. (I will probably put non-AI related stuff in this blog.)
A lot of my info can be seen on the constantly updating GDC page I put up. Remember, you can see my GDC pictures here. Some of them suck because I had to go without flash which left the shutter open longer... thus the blur. Many of those were strictly for my notes, anyway.
Now that I have seen Soren's lecture and had my interview with John, I will be updating Post-Play'em with my observations from their respective games. I also need to get into Halo 3 (if I have time) now that my step-daughter is distracted with the new Wii. I want to plow through that while Damian's lecture is still in my head. I just don't know if I can commit to it yet.
On a business note, we had some interest in the funding for Airline Traffic Manager that I need to pursue - so those of you who are fans, that's good news. Remember, however, the process is often long. I know you have been waiting for the development to move forward in earnest - but it is not something that will happen next week.
For those of you that are waiting patiently for me to finish up my notes from GDC, hang in there. I will be working on them tomorrow night and into the week.
I'm actually in the Denver airport at the moment (Sunday evening) and I wasn't in any shape to do anything but recover from the conference on Saturday. My notes are still here, however, and I will be posting all sorts of interesting items.
Also, coming on Wednesday is my 1-hour interview with John Abercrombie, AI lead on Bioshock... one AI programmer to another! Fun stuff!
See you once I'm actually back in town and my brain stops bleeding.
Day 2 of the Serious Games Summit at GDC really almost blended into the first mentally for me. Being in the same room both days made it difficult for me to remember what sessions were on what day. I had to look at the dates and times on my notes to keep them straight. Here's some tidbits from my notes.
Microsoft ESP – Taking Flight Simulator from Game to Serious Game Shawn Firminger – Microsoft
One thing that was reiterated as a theme of the whole summit was that it is very imperative to not treat your business audience the same as your entertainment audience. The reason that this is especially evident with Microsoft's ESP (a rebranding of their Flight Sim technology for business customers) is that it was and is an entertainment product at its core. It's not like many of the other projects in the SGS where something was designed as either a game or a sim... this was both. Shawn talked about how the business customers spoke a different language on many levels... both in describing the product but in describing their needs.
You also need to give them “Clear Value Proposition” for their business. Yeah, this seems really obvious - but it may be something that slips by unless you focus on it. Don't focus on how cool it is... but what it will do for them.
Endorsements are important to other companies… if one customer likes it, make sure the others know it.
Communicate more information about the future potential of the product. This makes it go beyond what it is doing right now... but what it could be down the road for them as well. What can we make it do?
The Ground Truth of Game Technologies for Homeland Security Training Donna Djordjevich – Sandia National Laboratories
This project, The Ground Truth, is along the lines of a Sim-City sort of disaster management simulation. You are tasked with running all the emergency responders. The first scenario was the “toxic city”. You play abstracted incident commander… run fire, police, hazmat, etc.
They used the USC GamePipe Labs and Sandia Inst. for modeling and simulation engine. They probably could have done a lot more with it, but it's still a work in process. There seems to be a lot of activity in this sort of space, however. The "first responder" simulations are being mentioned all over the place.
Their next scenario as part of this project is one involving an “active shooter”. They will be including emotionally-driven NPCs. They are interviewing subject-matter experts about such things as psychology in order to make the sim more realistic.
The Paradox of Play: The Challenge of Measuring What Game Players Learn Don Daglow (Stormfront) Alex Games, Frank Lantz (area/code) Richard Wainess (USC) Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab)
This session annoyed me in that it turned into a semantic argument about what is a game, what is learning, what is rote learning, etc. It really got rather pathetic and off-topic between a couple of the people and ended up going nowhere for a while. Nothing else worth noting here.
This session was rather interesting to me as I had just recently downloaded the game and messed about with it. My daughter is also very interested in animal behavior and played with it as well.
Unlike simply a website, the Minnesota zoo wanted more than just a method of delivering content. They wanted a realistic 3d world is important rather than just a token so that they could really immerse the player into what it is like to be a wolf... from the eyes of a wolf.
They used the “Unity” game authoring tool for prototyping and they swear by it (or got paid to mention it?).
One of the challenges, especially since they were catering to a wide age-range was to find a balance between realistic difficulty and prohibitive difficulty. For example, elk hunts in the wild can take hours. This was simply not feasible in the game. Wolves may also run for hours to look for stuff... again, not really all that fun, eh?
One big note was that they generated a lot of buzz before the release of the game through a community site. Not only did that help build the traffic, but it is a big way to keep the traffic coming back. There is quite a rabid (I did not just say that) fan base on there. This is important since the game is still expanding as they release more scenarios, etc.
Summary?
All in all, it was a great 2 days of learning what all is going on in the world of Serious Games.
My first day at the GDC involved me going to the Serious Games Summit. Since I enjoy the idea of the “deep sim” and the logic, math, and AI that goes into that sort of title, this is something that I am very interested in. Some of the sessions were more relevant than others to me and to Intrinsic Algorithm, but most of them were very interesting. Here’s a couple of notes on some of them:
Serious Games Taxonomy - Ben Sawyer
The whole point of this initial session was to define exactly what the “Serious Games” movement entails. One brief oversimplification was “A defined reapplication of video games.”
One issue that was covered here was a definition of terms. This is startlingly important, it seems. It helps the industry start to sub-divide what it is that we do. Just as in the entertainment world, we have genres like FPS, RTS, RPG, TBS, etc., there are probably 10 times the number of “genres” or applications in the Serious Games space. There are actually a staggering number of applications – some that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of. One great point that Ben Sawyer made was that using “game-based” as a prefix can combine with everything.
Education
Production
Simulation
Messaging
Training
Application
Visualization
Interfacing
Modeling
One common thread that was mentioned and was echoed throughout the day by various people, companies and projects was that there is still a stigma around even the word “game”. There seems to be an automatic dismissal or at least skepticism around something that is pitched or even described as a game. However, the exact same material described as a “simulation” or “training exercise” or “visualization tool” has an enormous impact.
Gamestar Mechanic - “A game about game design” (Gamelab)
This session was a very novel application of games… to teach children game development. I couldn’t wrap my head around this until I saw it in action. The result was rather interesting. They actually seemed to manage to make it applicable for a wide variety of skill levels in the High School age group.
One point that was made about the necessity for a game like this was that “Kids today need to develop a set of 21st-Century literacies, skills competencies.” Pardon the pun, but no kidding!
The game was designed to teach game design rather than programming – focus on features and parameters. In the beginning, the theme was using game puzzles in order to set stage for being able to solve game design challenges. Make them think about the qualities of the space and the qualities of the characters. Make kids think!
Teaching Journalism with Neverwinter Nights
Nora Paul - University of Minnesota Coll. of Lib. Arts.
In this project, the group actually used the engine for Neverwinter Nights to build a simulation to teach journalism. One important feature that they needed to use was the menu-driven dialog engine. That way they could build the deep interactive scenario of interviewing the people – which is the whole point of journalism. It was tied it to a specific course track and book that was used in the course. Specifically, they tied each part of game to a specific part of the journalism process.
They used Matt Taylor as a consultant using NWN Aurora toolkit and engine to create the game.
The big point of both of these education-based projects was the premise that “Doing things wrong and backtracking is part of education.”
Out of the Box: EA Fuels New Ideas with Madden & Sims Titles
EA put together a compelling presentation on how they (or simply other groups) have used their off the shelf products to do things other than entertainment.
One of them was the “Play Action Simulator” Using Madden interface as a coaching tool. Used by QB at LSU. Making training films for teams. By even running the game through a VR system to control the Madden engine it actually puts the player in the simulation.
Steve Seabolt talked about some things that were being done with the Sims/SIM-whatever franchise. With “SimCities Societies” they entered into a partnership with BP Alternative Energy to “Teach youth around the world about energy alternatives and choices…” (Not self-serving for the company)
Alice is an open-source education software teaching computer programming in a 3D environment that uses the SIMS engine. It should be free and will be released in the fall of 08 They claim that it is also good for building storytelling and very good for girls - both from the storytelling but also from a technology standpoint.
The Redistricting Game - Chris Swain (w/ Ben Sawyer)
This session was about a spectacular project involving the above-linked "Redistricting Game". It was designed with the "naive vision to allow public to come to an understanding" about the practice of gerrymandering districts for legislators. They wanted to not just teach about a social issue but allowing public to actually experience the issue. They did their best to model all the issues surrounding the legalities - including following the actual laws and rules of procedure that go into it.
I took a moment last night to play with the game a bit... it's very interesting... and enlightening.
I will try to insert some pictures into here that I took of the screens of all of the above, but I don't know how helpful that will be. Check back later.
I just started my Flickr collection for GDC 2008. I will dump all my pics up there every evening... assuming I can manage to run a computer at the end of the evening. Better descriptions will be forthcoming both during the week and in the days that follow.
Uploaded today are pictures from our hotel and from day 1 of the Serious Games Summit.
Ok... this is a blast from the past. I upgraded my Flickr account just so I could flood it with all these pictures from the GDCs and E3s that I went to. I plan on uploading tons of GDC pics when Laurie and I are out there next week to go along with blog posts on our activities. In the mean time, feel free to pore over hundreds of pictures of past Game Developers Conferences and Electronic Entertainment Expos!
Are you already a lead programmer that wants a new challenge?
Are you ready to make the jump to being a lead programmer?
Are you ready to run a team the way you have always wanted it to be run?
Does the thought of working for a small dynamic startup appeal to you?
Do you want to break out of the mold and live in the midwest? (Think "half the cost-of-living!")
Intrinsic Algorithm is looking for candidates to take on the roll of lead programmer for our studio in Omaha, NE. We are focused on realistic strategy, simulation and "god" games. For more details, please visit the following pages:
We will be accepting resumes at jobs@IntrinsicAlgorithm.com from now until GDC. Please send your resume as soon as possible and make a note of what days you will be available at the conference. As we all know, time is tight during GDC! Time permitting, we will be interested in meeting with only the most qualified candidates during the week of the conference. Even if we do not get a chance to meet with you, if you feel you are qualified, we would love to hear from you.
Please note that we are currently discussing funding with various parties for this title. Therefore, we are soliciting "Letters of Intent" for this position. The better your resume, the less time it will take for us to move forward!
Please... if your credentials do not meet what is required on the job posting linked above, do not submit for this position. Feel free to contact us separately for potential other jobs, however, and we will be happy to keep your resume on file.
This is my tentative schedule for GDC. I'm kind of annoyed that many of my sessions overlap. I suppose that's one of the main reasons why I bring Laurie so she can go to the business and legal ones. However, I hate having to choose between the ones on AI and agile development, for example.
Obviously, you can click on the links to learn more about the sessions and/or the people.
My week will also include:
Tuesday night:IGDA party Wednesday night: Booth crawl & Game Developers Choice Awards Thursday night: Author's party for my publisher (see sidebar for link to AI Wisdom 4) Friday night: AI Programmers Dinner and possibly Video Games Live
The GDC folks have put up the main page for the 
Are you already a lead programmer that wants a new challenge?
