Real-Time Case-Based Reasoning for Interactive Digital Entertainment

(Click image to view the video – it’s near the bottom of the new page.) User-generated content is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, and every other type of digital media on the Social Web. Games are no exception. From strategy games to immersive virtual worlds, game players are increasingly engaged in creating and sharing [...]

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Meta-Level Behavior Adaptation in Real-Time Strategy Games

AI agents designed for real-time settings need to adapt themselves to changing circumstances to improve their performance and remedy their faults. Agents typically designed for computer games, however, lack this ability. The lack of adaptivity causes a break in player experience when they repeatedly fail to behave properly in circumstances unforeseen by the game designers. [...]

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User-Generated AI for Interactive Digital Entertainment

User-generated content is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, and every other type of digital media on the Social Web. Games are no exception. From strategy games to immersive virtual worlds, game players are increasingly engaged in creating and sharing nearly all aspects of the gaming experience: maps, quests, artifacts, avatars, clothing, even games [...]

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Drama Management and Player Modeling for Interactive Fiction Games

A growing research community is working towards employing drama management components in story-based games. These components gently guide the story towards a narrative arc that improves the player’s gaming experience. In this paper we evaluate a novel drama management approach deployed in an interactive fiction game called Anchorhead. This approach uses player’s feedback as the [...]

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Run-Time Behavior Adaptation for Real-Time Interactive Games

Intelligent agents working in real-time domains need to adapt to changing circumstance so that they can improve their performance and avoid their mistakes. AI agents designed for interactive games, however, typically lack this ability. Game agents are traditionally implemented using static, hand-authored behaviors or scripts that are brittle to changing world dynamics and cause a [...]

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Emotional Memory and Adaptive Personalities

Believable agents designed for long-term interaction with human users need to adapt to them in a way which appears emotionally plausible while maintaining a consistent personality. For short-term interactions in restricted environments, scripting and state machine techniques can create agents with emotion and personality, but these methods are labor intensive, hard to extend, and brittle [...]

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Creating Behavior Authoring Environments for Everyday Users

The design of interactive experiences is increasingly important in our society. Examples include interactive media, computer games, and interactive portals. There is increasing interest in modes of interaction with virtual characters, as they represent a natural way for humans to interact. Creating such characters is a complex task, requiring both creative skills (to design personalities, [...]

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Argumentation-Based Information Exchange in Prediction Markets

We investigate how argumentation processes among a group of agents may affect the outcome of group judgments. In particular we focus on prediction markets (also called information markets). We investigate how the existence of social networks (that allow agents to argue with one another to improve their individual predictions) effect on group judgments. Social networks [...]

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Adaptive Computer Games: Easing the Authorial Burden

Game designers usually create AI behaviors by writing scripts that describe the reactions to all imaginable circumstances within the confines of the game world. The AI Programming Wisdom series provides a good overview of current scripting techniques used in the game industry. Scripting is expensive and it’s hard to plan. So, behaviors could be repetitive [...]

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Driving Interactive Drama Research through Building Complete Systems

Interactive drama presents one of the most challenging applications of autonomous characters, requiring characters to simultaneously engage in moment-by-moment personality-rich physical behavior, exhibit conversational competencies, and participate in a dynamically developing story arc. One way to advance the field and continue to make exciting progress is to develop building blocks needed for creating these interactive [...]

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