The author is not alone... many players want what he lists here. And they are getting rather vocal about it. I'm just not so sure that the game companies and the publishers "get it" yet.
I took a moment to assure him that we, as AI programmers, hear his plaintive cry. This, my colleagues, is why we formed the AI Game Programmers Guild and why we are holding the AI Summit at GDC.
I happened across this blog review of the game "Days of Ruin" for Nintendo DS the other day. I noticed it because my Google alert for "GAME AI" picked up the following sentence.
The game's AI is sneaky and -well- intelligent too.
Well, that was certainly a promising hook, so I investigated further. The paragraph continued:
It responds to the type of units you create and your strategy. If you make an army of wartanks, it'll create an army of anti-tanks to counter your offense. If you make bombers to get rid of his anti-tanks, it'll create fighters to take down your bombers. If you happen to have an artillery bombardment as a defensive strategy, it will try to keep its ground units away from your range and will cautiously try to take it down when you drop your guard.
My thought was... uh, OK. Hardly sneaky or intelligent. Actually, that type of balancing act is rather simple to accomplish. And then I read the next paragraph...
While the game is fun, it also comes with a bit of frustration. In addition to a really smart AI, your computer opponent also has an unfair advantage of extra units, money, and bigger guns. Making the game, in some chapters, nigh unbeatable until you find the perfect strategy. I swear I was stuck in 2, probably 3, chapters for weeks. And without an option to change the difficulty of the game, I almost gave up on it after a lot of my strategies have failed.
This is the price you pay for that simplicity. While it is easy to do the reaction-based AI that was alluded to at first, it is a little more important to be able to tweak it to not be a challenge all the time.
According to this article at EETimes.com, there is an AI research group at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that believes that they are in the process of creating an AI entity that will finally be able to pass the legendary Turing Test. Their target date is this fall. They need to use the world's fastest supercomputer, IBM's Blue Gene in order to get the real-time results necessary, however. Interestingly, they are partnering with a multimedia group that is designing a holodeck... yes, as in Star Trek.
"We are building a knowledge base that corresponds to all of the relevant background for our synthetic character--where he went to school, what his family is like, and so on," said Selmer Bringsjord, head of Rensselaer's Cognitive Science Department and leader of the research project.
In order to come up with the complete personality and history, they are taking a novel approach. One of Bringsjord's graduate students is providing his life as the model. They are in the process of putting all that data into their knowledge base. Facts, figures, family trivia and even personal beliefs from the student are what is going to make up the synthetic character.
"This synthetic person based on our mathematical theory will carry on a conversation about himself, including his own mental states and the mental states of others," said Bringsjord.
However, before you game AI programmers get all excited about this as some sort of potential middleware product...
"Our artificial intelligence algorithm is now making this possible, but we need a supercomputer to get real-time performance."
It looks like they are doing more than just facts and figures on the project, however. They are going to great lengths to add psychology and even a form of empathy (my word, not theirs).
The key to the realism of RPI's synthetic characters, according to Bringsjord, is that RPI is modeling the mental states of others--in particular, one's beliefs about others' mental states. "Our synthetic characters have correlates of the mental states experienced by all humans," said Bringsjord. "That's how we plan to pass this limited version of the Turing test."
The difference with this compared to standard ,observable facts is "second-order beliefs". In order to do that, you have to be able to get outside of your own collection of perceptions, memories and beliefs and into the mind of others. In a demo that they put together on Second Life (which I will not bother embedding here since it is unexplained and boring), they show that they have been working on 1st order and 2nd order beliefs.
An example is, if something changes after a person leaves the room, you observe the change but they don't, you must know that the absent person will have no knowledge of that change even though you do. Therefore, the other person's belief is that it is actually unchanged. You have to be able to look at the world through their eyes... not just in the present tense, but by replaying the recent history and knowing that they would have no knowledge of the change that occurred.
Hell... as Soren Johnson pointed out in his GDC lecture, we can't even afford to do individual "fog of war" for 8 or 10 computer-controlled enemies. At least not on a typical PC. Imagine trying to keep all that activity straight in a running buffer of some sort... for everything in the environment. *sigh*
I keep having to go back to what Ray Kurzweil was predicting at his GDC keynote... that there is still a logarithmic growth in capability happening in technology. Given his figures, putting this sort of depth in a computer game will definately happen in my lifetime - and perhaps in my career. Now that will be scary.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is just way too simple. The game is so simple to play that a monkey could easily score a touchdown on the lacking AI defense of the computer. If you want to win games in NFL Tour, just snap the ball and pass to anyone. Don’t worry… unless you are terrible, there is no such thing as an incompletion. I put in about 6 hours of gameplay and my QB accuracy is 100%.
I guess that really shows that it takes a team like the Madden/EA crowd 10... 20... 30 years of working on a franchise before they can get AI to what it needs to be (almost?). Sports AI will always be a challenge... and this title looks like they are trying to prove it.
For more scathing comments on NFL Tour, hit these...
Gamasutra recently posted an interview with David Braben (notably a co-writer of "Elite" from the 80s as well as other games). In it, he discusses his upcoming game "The Outsider" where they are working on expanding the concept of dynamic story generation beyond the "branching storyline" feel of many of today's games.
A selection from page 1 of 4 of the interview:
Most of [the companies that have moved gameplay forward] are quite subtle. We've certainly seen things like Oblivion where you've got all the side quests that make the world feel a lot better.
The Darkness touched on that a little bit as well, and quite a few games have elements of what you might call 'side gameplay' that help feed into the richness, but they don't fundamentally alter the story: games like Deus Ex where you had branching story, and there was some slight branching in games like Indigo Prophecy. So, I think all of those things are positive, but a lot of them felt, to me, like they hadn't done the trick.
The problem is, I felt they didn't quite deliver on their promise. Their promise is not actually the fact that you can play it through and have a different story, because that sounds fundamentally irrelevant -- you play a game through and think, "So what, I could have done things slightly differently". That's not the point. I find that once you try playing games in a slightly contrary way, you end up finding a lot of blind alleys, things that you just can't do, which I think is tragic. If you offer that promise, you've got to deliver on it.
So it's not so much the fact of the story being able to go lots of different ways. It's the fact that you can try a lot of different things and you'll find a way through. It may not be what you anticipated, but there is a way through. I think it's that sort of thing -- being able to experiment with the world in a fun way.
I would agree that there are a lot of things that could be done to move away from the linearity of gameplay in games. Certain titles that offer sidequests give the appearance of this as Braben mentions.
I played through most of Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 - and did my utmost to complete all the side-quests. But I was well aware of the fact that a designer had dropped these quests into the game all over. They were smaller carrots than the main theme of the game, but they were dangling veggies nonetheless. I was also well aware of when I had completed all of them and had to get back about the business of the main plotline. Sure, I could wander about the cities and wilderness aimlessly like I was out for a stroll, but no one would have anything to do with me unless there was a quest attached to them. So what was the point? At that stage, I was merely procrastinating with what I was "supposed to be doing" as concevied and presented by the design team.
I think that about the closest we have to open game play these days is RTS and TBS games. Civ 4 is my latest obsessionresearch project. All it does is give me the rules of the world and a variety of potential end goals (note: not just ONE end goal). After that, it turns me loose to do whatever I want. There is no string I have to follow through the maze.
The Sims, Sim City, and other "god games" are similar. "Here's your sandbox - go make something." But how does this get mapped succesfully over to the RPG - or even FPS genre? Heck, it took years for the MMO world to get over the chorus of "but what am I supposed to do? What's the story?" The meek answer from the industry was "uh... make your own story...?"
Part of the process will have to be making gamers comfortable with the concept. There are many people who want to be told exactly what to do next. They don't want to think - they want to act. Until that mentality is softened up a bit, any game that lacks that linear component runs the risk of being critically panned by the media and gamers alike.
It looks like Braben addresses this somewhat in "The Outsider".
The actual problem is, when you start making a story very flexible, you're putting your hand in a mincing machine from a design point of view.
But also, you have to cater for a lot of different types of play style. There are still the sort of people who want a brain-off experience, and I think that's a good thing -- I don't think that's a criticism. You don't want to have to think, "Oh, what am I supposed to do now," because that's the flipside of this, the unspoken problem.
[Objectives] should still be really obvious, but there's something nice about when you go through doing what you're told, and you think, "Wait a second, this isn't quite right!" And it's that same element with Outsider where you've got corruption, that it's really quite interesting. Now, you can play through the [straightforward] route, and you end up with quite an interesting ending, but you can also break off at any second, and start questioning why things are happening the way they're happening.
So really I like where he says he's going with the game. It will be interesting to see how the implementation plays out (so to speak).
According to reviews of "Pro Evolution Soccer 2008" from Konami, there is now an adaptive AI component. This system, called "TeamVision", aparently learns the way you play. If you always use the same tactics, it will start taking advantage of them - both on offense and defense. Every review site I have looked at has a similar blurb to that effect, but I have yet to see any technical description of how they are accomplishing it. More research is necessary!
If you have run across information on this game and specifically the "TeamVision" adaptive AI system from Konami, please let me know so I can follow up.
The author is not alone... many players want what he lists here. And they are getting rather vocal about it. I'm just not so sure that the game companies and the publishers "get it" yet.
Gamasutra
