Issues and Approaches in Artificial Intelligence Middleware Development for Digital Games and Entertainment Products


Karlsson Börje Felipe Fernandes
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This work presents issues and approaches regarding the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) middleware to aid the development of digital games and entertainment products in general. It starts with a discussion of the concept and context of an AI middleware (emphasizing the relations of traditional AI areas with computer games). Then, some approaches to the problem of creating an AI middleware are presented, followed by a taxonomy regarding design methods and componentization, and related research. Finally, we discuss the impact of such middleware, open issues to be addressed and future directions.

 

Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural Form


Giddings Seth
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Game studies has yet to engage with a sustained debate on the implications of its fundamentally technologically based foundation – i.e. the ‘digitality’ of digital games. This paper calls for such a debate and offers some initial thoughts on issues and directions. The humanities and social sciences are founded on the principle that historical and cultural agency reside solely in the human and the social. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, Actor-Network Theory and cybercultural studies, this paper argues that a full understanding of both the playing of digital games, and the wider techno-cultural context of this play, is only possible through a recognition and theorisation of technological agency. Taking the Gameboy Advance game Advance Wars 2 as a case study, the paper explores the implications for game studies of attention to non-human agency – specifically the agency of simulation and artificial life software - in digital game play.

 

Dialog as a Game


Border Peter M.
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

We describe a technique to manage pre-written lines of dialog by treating a conversation as a game. Thinking of conversation as a game means structuring it as a series of moves, made according to rules, with some sort of score. Speakers in our system converse by participating in short dialog trees, and make “moves” by negotiating transitions between trees. Speakers have internal state variables which describe their standing in the conversation and their emotional state. Speakers try to manage the conversation so as to maximize a payoff function of their internal variables. We believe that this technique will allow us to create lifelike NPC dialog, and allow our NPCs to play a more social role in game worlds. We also believe that games in general desperately need to have more socially coherent NPCs, and that improving dialog is a critical problem in game development.