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An AI Coach for Bad Gamers?
newchurch writes "In this week's "Gaming in 2020" issue of The Escapist, Chris Dahlen writes about a no-talent gamer who gets help from the 'Nintendo Coach' - an AI installed in the console that watches him play and gives him pointers and feedback. This is set 14 years in the future, but how hard would it really be for a next-gen console to pull this off? Would gamers want this kind of thing, to make them more competitive or just to help them master a title like Ninja Gaiden? And would your average gamers even admit they need help?"
What about game enemies learning tricks from the player?
Play a deathmatch against bots, that learn movement patterns of players, instead of using predefined paths, learn new ones by watching the players and follow them, becoming more of a challenge, less predictable, learning most efficient tricks? At first the game is just a game against bots. Later it becomes a game against yourself. And if you limit the bot to learn from you, and not from the "hive mind" that contains tricks from all players, fighting it you learn your own weaknesses.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
There's already too much of this in gaming today. You can't go 10 paces in any game without some pop-up dialogue box or voice telling you what to do and how to do it. I'm sick of my instruction manual being in the game; I'd rather figure things out for myself. Isn't that what it's all about?
2020:
Coach,"The first step to recovery is to admit you have a video game playing problem."
Guy,"Ok, I admit it, I have a problem."
Coach,"Alright, now lets review your build order for Xel'naga."
Guy,"Wait, I thought my problem was that I'm addicted to video games."
Coach,"There's no such thing."
Guy,"Oh cool, thanks. I don't need you anymore. I'm going to go back to playing Duke Nukem Forever"
God spoke to me.
Ok, go into this tunnel. Ok, left...left again. Kill that guy.
...
/switch AI Coach off
Good, ok...go here. Get that gun. Jump this lava thingy. Kill that guy.
Ok, now right. No, your other right, dummy. You stepped on a trap! Oh noes, they're coming. RUN!
LEFT! GO BACK GO BACK GO BACK! WAIT WAIT, NOT THAT WAY! Awwww....dammit.
It's not my fault!
This is the wrong way around. If a gamer is having difficulty in a single-player game, the right thing to do is usually to detect this and ramp the difficulty down for them. Believe it or not, most people who are bad at gaming are bad because they are casual gamers. The last thing people like that would care about is any kind of coaching.
Coach: I see you are trying to kill a Ninja, would you like help?
* Get Help Killing The Ninja.
* Just kill the Ninja without help.
[]Don't show this messege again.
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"C'MON! We have to go this way! What're you trying to do? Its not XYYBYAXYYB, its XYYBYAXXYYB." ;-)
Yes I am exaggerating, but nothing motivates you to learn a game like Halo or SSBM like having your kids pound time and again.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
It was called Tamagotchi.
Some "AI" tells you what you have to do.
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And would your average gamers even admit they need help?
Of course not.
my l33t skillz pwn u any d4y biatch ch3ck teh mad aimb0t i got w/ my 133t skilz f4gs u wish u had m4d h4xx0rz lik3 me
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
For most games, there really isn't a substitute for just playing or just playing with others. Most AI these days for FPSs feature increasing difficulty of bots that you can train against.
The more chess-like the game, the more coaching might help.
Have you ever noticed how much of life consists of arms races in one form or another?
If everybody uses AI coaches, will that make everyone l33t or will it just raise the minimum requirement for playing online without embarrassing yourself?
Clear, Dark Skies
how hard would it really be for a next-gen console to pull this off? The current level of AI found in modern games is not a limit of how smart the processor is. AI is limited by the inability to express AI-ness in modern programming languages.
An AI coach would have to be more than Navi from Ocarina of Time too. In theory, it could replace talking to tons of townspeople for clues and hints, annoying fairies, and the like. I think I would use it if I got stuck in some place and didn't know what to do, but that really doesn't happen that often with current-gen games. There's enough memory that characters can give you all the information you need.
The catch for me is that we already have the townsfolk, the fairy, et. al. They work well enough and add to the environmental realism/fantasy in ways that a coach wouldn't. Star Wars wouldn't be nearly as cool if Obi Wan was always just over Luke's shoulder telling him what to do.
Having a coach would either need to be extremely detailed in its instructions, like a walkthrough. The only reason I might use it would be for random sidequests that seem to have dead ends. But for that I usually go to an online walkthrough. They're never essential for beating the game (hence "sidequest"), so I don't think it would be practical for most gamers. It would only work for those too young and uneducated to understand the puzzles or for the absolutely new gamer. Other than that, I don't forsee it being all that useful.
Funtime Candy Wow! - my plan for eventually conquering Japan.
The racing game Forza (on XBox) has something like this now, albeit nonverbally. You can turn on a trainer that places arrows on the track to indicate the line you should be driving, which is not a big deal; however, that line is dynamically updated as you drive to give you information that's pertinent to your current performance and situation.
Let's say you drive into a turn too quickly. What were once green arrows (to say "keep going, no need to slow down") suddenly turn yellow, then red, as you pass the point at which you should have hit the brakes. Once you've slowed down enough to recover, the arrows go back to green (or yellow). This simple mechanism is surprisingly useful.
It's not a big leap to take that data and present it in faux-human form (a voice saying "You're driving into the turns too fast!" and a worried face on your robo-instructor) instead of graphically. So yeah, it's already here.
While I realise Tekken has a "training mode", where you're supposed to look at some tiny Help window and somehow associate strange phrases with what (at first) appear to be arbitrary button combinations, that gets pretty old fast.
It would be a lot better with a coach telling you when to use each move, since they all seem equally wicked and the more complicated moves don't seem particularly useful at first.
Similarly, I'd love a coach for a tennis game. While the controls for a tennis game are much easier to master than for a combat game, I'd rather build up my tennis character stats by training on the court than by playing silly mini-games.
With any of these ideas, the player could simultaneously learn the controls of the game and some techniques in the actual sport.
The really, really bad players are either total n00bs, or really don't have an interest in that particular game, in which case, there's no point in going on. In the case of the former, where players are total n00bs, most modern games like Civ IV (or even Chess) have startup tips, which can be turned off.
I personally have no interest in racing games, sports games, and I'll be totally inept at playing them. No amount of coaching from the AI (or real people) will make me any better, or for that matter, even appreciate the help.
Ever watched a chess match between two computers?
Is it as fun as watching one between humans?
Why become more like computers, when what we are really trying to do is make computers more like us?
Rome: Total War did this... in the 2004, I think.
You have two person that gave you hints on battle and on the build game section, such as "ok, look at that chivalry on right" or "Build a market to collect more taxes" and so on.
And the one in the battle was actually useful, as the camera was not so easy to handle.
In every online game I've played, people will always ask stupid questions that they could have answered themselves by looking at the manual/FAQ in about 30 seconds. The only thing worse than that are n00bs who don't even ask (in the case of the current game I'm wasting my time with, Tremulous, I often see 'UnnamedPlayer' trying to build a base, which leaves me with the choice of trying to fix his mistakes and getting the base pwned by goons because there weren't enough defences from the two of us fighting for build points, or just trying to shoot stuff, but the base still gets pwned by goons because the n00b did everything wrong, and no amount of shooting stuff will fix it). If people would RTFM, they would know the basics (like not building anything until you have an idea of what a base should look like), and save everyone else a lot of headaches.
A mouse is a device used to point to the xterm you want to type in
In every form I've seen this, it does nothing but piss me off. Sure, sometimes they have a point, but no one likes a backseat driver, especially when they're dead right. This would probably be hilariously annoying for being dead wrong, and having a limited number of canned phrases.
"There's some Nazi guards sneaking up on you."
In real life? My response would probably be:
"You've only told me this eight fucking times in the past 30 seconds. Has it occurred to you that maybe I'm setting a trap, and don't want them to know I've noticed them yet? Or maybe it's simpler: I'm sniping some guys off the building nextdoor. Every time you say that it throws off my aim, and judging by their sweep, they'll probably notice me soon. I just need ten more seconds to pick off the last of them, giving me plenty of time to spin around and toss a grenade at these fools trying to sneak up on me."
Ok, that may be a bit far-fetched, but the only hint system that ever worked for me was a tip of the day, or the gentle introduction to the game. I do NOT want Clippy in my games! Especially considering a human coach has a hard enough time figuring out what I'm about to pull, what makes you think a bot really knows whether I'm not paying attention to my minimap, or whether I simply don't care. Or whether it's so blatantly obvious that it's just more noise... yeah, I do NOT need the bot to tell me Flood are closing in from every possible direction, and I do NOT need to hear "Are you checking your minimap? Are you checking your minimap? Are you checking your minimap?" while I'm trying to spray my SMG fire efficiently enough that I'll be able to reload without dying.
A beginner might find this useful, but really, they could gain a lot more by either playing online or cooperatively (learning by example things the AI won't dream of for another two years) or by simply referring back to the manual now and then, or at least doing a casual, visual sweep of the screen to make sure there isn't some HUD element (like the minimap) that they've been forgetting to check.
That's what I want in a game, really -- decent co-op, teammates who won't accidently kill me if I allow friendly fire to count, who know when to give me covering fire, when to just watch my back and let me kick ass, and when to take the easy kills (grunts) while I go after hunters/bosses. But then, maybe I just need to play the Half-Life 2 episodes.
Maybe me and my perfect bot can go assassinate Clippy with a coordinated RPG attack. Screw that, coordinated Redeemers. "Imagine every atom in your body accelerating outward at the speed of light..."
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You will never see this "feature" in a game.
Since the development costs of games are skyrocketing and companies want to maximize their profit with little risk, they seek out ways to provide as much pleasure as possible to as many people as possible for the lowest amount of money possible.
The budget to create something like this could be much more readily implemented into providing better AI for enemies, which is something that more people would appreciate, and get more use out of. Not only that, but it's quite a bit easier for the developer to make a multiplayer system that rewards people for playing against other people and excelling at that, than it would be to code a tutorbot.
Not that I like his voice, but pressing the "suggest" key during play choosing in Madden football will cause him to highlight a play and say something like "A good coach would choose this play," or "Great, now run it up the gut with this one."
yeah, I agree... I wouldn't want help in an FPS, the mechanics of an FPS are pretty much the same you've either got it or you don't, past that it just comes down to level and weapon familiarity which can't easily be passed on by a "coach" without holding your hand.
Fighting games rely heavily on your familiarity with the different moves the characters perform, they typically offer a sparing mode which is far more beneficial then a "coach" would be. BOTH of those game types are too fast for decent live coaching anyway.
Strategy games makes sense, If I'm playing hexic it might be nice to have a coach make move suggestions and tell me why. Similarly I think SPORTS games could best benefit from virtual coaches. I know in Fight Night your coach actually talks to you, tells you need to block more or be more aggressive. You usually only get 1 or 2 tidbits of advice per round but it is often useful for determining where your weak points are and how to do better in the next round. I'd love to have a coach in Rockstar's New Table Tennis game, something that would give me shot by shot suggestions for a couple of games. They give you "tips" whenever your opponent scores but they're pretty useless, if you were caught at the wrong side of the table it will say something stupid like "be closer to the ball when you swing" Well no crap but how do I play so that I don't get myself into that situation in the first place.
Also wouldn't it be cool if you could enable an option in something like Madden where the voice of the actual coach for your team made play suggestions into your headset. Where he would make the calls the real coach would make if the team were in that situation. you could turn it off or just ignore him if you wanted but you'd still have to execute his suggestions.
I think it just makes sense to have coaches for games that have coaches in real life.
Collector's Edition
Since this article has mostly funny (yet somewhat snide) comments about its subject, I'd like to mention what it's really about (this poster got it) - adaptive feedback AI training. I actually worked on a research project doing this during my last two years of college, where we had an AI model that was studying aircraft pilots flying predesignated courses, and based on the control inputs and eye-tracking data, the system was intended to provide real-time corrective feedback how the pilot was performing.
This isn't supposed to be "Dude, the boss is right over there, now go kill him!" type feedback. This is designed to notice trends in player behavior and offer cues and more indirect advice than anything.
I know the coaching and help text in most games to date has been pretty bad so I know where a lot of this derision comes from, but there is a fair bit of CogSci research going on in this very field, so give the researchers some credit.
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then the complaints will just be "Learn to do x, noob!" Where x wasn't covered by the AI.
In other words, additional training may change the range over which skills vary but it won't change the fact that skills vary - nor will it change the behavior of the skilled and the unskilled.
Clear, Dark Skies
I've been gaming since the Atari days, and I still suck at competitive games. The problem is nobody accepts you because you aren't good enough, and then you can't learn to be good because nobody'll play with you.