Game AI Conference Explored

Academia Blog Grand Text Auto has up a long set of notes from last week's first AI and Interactive Entertainment conference, which includes keynote talks from Doug Church, Will Wright, Chris Crawford and Damian Isla of Halo 2. From the Doug Church talk: "none of the AI detail gets attention in a 30 second ad or magazine blurb...also, if a character in battle only lives a minute, there's not much fidelity players can even perceive...industry has been promising good characters for a long time, not delivered... players are cynical, don't want to hear it anymore...hard to back out of the fakery"

Comments

Re:And now that think about it...

[Snowmit]

It looks a whole lot like a computer because that's the dominant metaphor that we're using and we're filtering our explanations through that idea.

At the time of Descartes, they thought that everything looked kind of like it was clockwork and so they made explanation using that metaphor. Freud did a pretty good job of explaining the psyche in terms of conflicting forces and Jung did it by populating our heads with stereotypes.

Metaphors are cool that way - they are flexible and once you get a halfway good metaphor, you start noticing all kinds of similarities (for example have you noticed that EVERYONE either looks like a pig or a rat? try it!). But it's good to remember that the map is not the territory.