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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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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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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Emotionally Driven Natural Language Generation for Personality Rich Characters in Interactive Games

Natural Language Generation for personality rich characters represents one of the important directions for believable agents research. The typical approach to interactive NLG is to hand-author textual responses to different situations. In this paper we address NLG for interactive games. Specifically, we present a novel template-based system that provides two distinct advantages over existing systems. [...]

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Towards Runtime Behavior Adaptation for Embodied Characters

Typically, autonomous believable agents are implemented using static, hand-authored reactive behaviors or scripts. This hand-authoring allows designers to craft expressive behavior for characters, but can lead to excessive authorial burden, as well as result in characters that are brittle to changing world dynamics.
In this paper we present an approach for the runtime adaptation of reactive [...]

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