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Infinite Games?
Anonymous Coward writes "BBC is running a story on how US scientists are working on improving AI - with potential benefits for coming games.
The system, called Liquid Narrative allows to avoid scripted storylines, and finally gives us, the gamers, full freedom to do whatever we want to do. R. Michael Young, the project coordinator, says:
'Game companies are realising that story telling has a lot of potential that has not been tapped yet.'"
Computer scientists drooled like curs at true AI twenty or thirty years ago, but that was before people had run out of ideas pertaining to AI. Today the only problems AI can solve are uninteresting ones.
In the case of a game, I'd call it "automatic choosing of next state" rather than any form of "intelligence".
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
I hadn't realized that research into AI continued. I thought it was pretty much abandoned in favor of statistical methods in the late 80's. But if all goes well, we all stand to benefit.
It's a little short sighted to talk about the application to games. Since when have games pushed innovation? Rather, I'm looking forward to intelligent machines like coffee makers that know how to make good coffee and record players that can mix tracks and perform scratches without a human DJ.
Artificial Intelligence need not be feared, if we use it wisely and with caution. It could save our people, if we only have the courage to take it.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
...there's a very interesting game out there called AISLE. It's interactive fiction, and, while you only get one move per game, you can do pretty much anything that you want in that one move. While it certainly isn't infinitely playable, there's feedback for many inputs that you'd never expect.
-R
I have always wondered what the main difference between computer gaming and Pen and Paper gaming. The difference is the assumed rules. If we can set up a universe that has a really good predefined set of rules, like "if (breathing) then alive" etc, then we could put together a real universe.
I remember experimenting with Prolog which is not a set functional language but a rules-based language. By constantly checking the rules you can generate new rules and build a universe (genetically, nuerally).
Our minds are rule based, while our problem solving is sequential. This is the difference and I am glad these people are working on it.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
There is value in basic research, unfortunately very few people in power believe it's worth and are constantly cutting research budgets.
By developing this, wouldn't the game developers be shooting themselves in the foot? If the game industry is dependant on people buying newer and better games (and keeping the money flowing into their pockets), by developing a game that is "infinite" (different every time, with no end), wouldn't people just buy that one game, and stop buying others?
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
A good few years ago, I wrote an MA Thesis on videogame culture. One of the areas that I looked at was the striving towards psychological mastery in videogames through a striving for the end - telos. In psychological terms, videogames insert "the subject into a narrative in which she or he sees herself or himself projected as the hero and potential master" (Peter Buse, 'Nintendo and Telos: Will You Ever Reach the End?' Cultural Critique 34 (1996) 163-84 (p.169))
The ideas that Liquid Narrative are developing - realtime self-evolving narrative strands, reactive storytelling etc, seem to play interestingly into this notion of psychic development.
However, one question I ask is: do games need narrative at all? Games are about play - we are all home ludens. Do basketball games need narrative? The most interesting, successful and universally appealing games are those such as Tetris, where there is no end, but no story to get there either.
So right now, some people are a bit squeamish about a game like GTA:VC, because of how it sort of encourages killing lots of innocent virtual people.
But I don't think people are worried about killing the "AIs" for their own sake--the civillians are dumber than ants--but because they remind us of "real humans", and we don't want people to become casual about the lives of those.
But what if AI advances to the point where the enemy in the game is effectively self-aware? Works to defend its self-interest, understands the situation and its place in that, has an idea of the motivation of the human player and other ingame entities, etc etc....it's a long way off, but should we ever feel bad about killing 'em?
And if not, why not? Does the fact that these virtual people are likely to be trivially duplicatable inherently diminish their value as entities? (And if so, if someone could make a perfect copy of you right now, would you be more willing to get killed?)
(I think all these thought experiments are interesting, though less so if consciousness (as we commonly think of it) ends up being more or less the "benign user illusion" some materialist philosophers describe it as. But if we take that full viewpoint, we need new standards to base some of our concepts of right and wrong on.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
... because god knows plot can't exist in a game with good graphics!
This argument is horrible. Go back and play some of those "great" games that you remember from back then and you'll see how shallow the plots actually are. I recently went back and played FF3(6) again, and I couldn't even finish it - It just couldn't grab my attention anymore. Now compare it to something like Suikoden 3 which has an incredibly engrossing storyline told in a great manner.
Companies are putting a LOT more emphasis on plot nowadays (heh, in fact, Squaresoft is basically putting ALL the emphasis on plot! (see FFX)). The reason we think they're not is that we're becoming older and we need a LOT more to keep our attention. When I was 14 and playing FF3, it completely overwhelmed me, but now it can't keep my interest at all.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I had an AI class with him. In one of those classes, he demoed this stuff. It was using the Unreal Tournament engine. Two demos he gave. One, two characters were put in a maze, without scripted moves and only knowledge of their immediate surroundings, and the knowledge of where they want to be and how to open doors (seemed like they had to go press and hold triggers or something, it's been awhile. Wasn't too terribly exciting by itself. This is along the lines I think when I think about traditional AI research, but doesn't strike me as very useful to a game..
The other was the user walked around an aquarium, and fish swam however they saw fit. The interesting part was the plaques that gave information about the animals. There was a database of factoids, and some rules about grammar and various languages, but no pre-written plaques. When viewed, the plaques contained a generated paragraph which presented some of the facts. The paragraph was always different every time you looked, and it could do it in several languages. This demonstrated how it could be used in an educational application, but also how it could be used to make NPC dialog more dynamic and realistic ('Times are Tough...').
The ultimate goal was to have a few stated conditions, and maybe end conditions, and allow the gamer full control over the environment, and have the story adapt to the conditions the player causes, if the story as planned to that point becomes impossible due to a players actions (say player is on an island with only one boat around, and he is expected to go to another island, but destroys the boat instead), a new story is generated on the fly. The computer adlibs. Also, if the game absolutely, positively requires that the player go to another island, some mechanisms can be put in, such as if the boat is not there, helicopter or another boat comes in and the occupants conveniently walk away from it.
He described the goal to be a fully interactive story, that is never the same twice through. A very interesting boon to RPGs as we know it. The aquarium demo at least showed promise for better NPC dialog. I don't know if they have anything to show the evolving story yet though...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The Sim series of games are inherently unending, yet they're thriving, and now have one of the most recognized brands in the US.
What's kept the Sims series alive? Constant upgrades and updates.
Michael C. Hollinger
Now if David Braben and his company would get this new concept of AI into their forthcoming (if ever coming) Elite 4 and add in concepts from Morrowind 2 and fractal generated planetscapes with fractal generated cities and civilisations (You will be able to land on planets and do stuff in Elite 4)... that would be The Infinite Game
I dunno about you, but I get a sense of satisfaction when I finally BEAT a game. You know, complete all the missions, quests, whatever, resolve the story. I want there to be an end boss. I want to kill that boss, save the princess, save the world, whatever. I want to soak up the story that went along with it and remember it fondly, like a good movie. And then I want to get another game and experience the same. For me, gaming is like playing a good novel. Just because it's "open ended" doesn't mean it'll be good. Part of the fun (and frustration) in many games is the limitations and learning to work around them.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
While I am sure the reasons you've given are equally if not more important, I think having the development team for the engine you're using a short distance from campus certainly doesn't hurt anything.
I'm surprised nobody's compared this to good old Orson Scott Card. A game that makes itself up as you keep playing? Next thing you know, we'll have AI constructs self-perpetuating themselves over interplanetary networks...
"Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so."
-Douglas Adams
David Borowitz
It seems everybody's talking about first-person shooters, which, if that's the point of this seems pretty limited to me, but imagine how much it would change a world war two simulation, where an online group of players were a single squadron. Using a system like this to manage an entire war scenario could bring strategy games to the front and knock splatter games down a peg or two.