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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"
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.
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.