Simulating Emotions Within Games

Gamasutra is running an opinion piece about the way video games handle simulated emotions. Most often, an non-player character's emotional state is used to either tell a story or to drive gameplay. The author suggests that as both concepts become more complex in modern games, the simulation of emotions must also become more dynamic to remain interesting. Quoting: "Most of our emotional simulations use a simple sensation/calculation/behavior loop. Someone says or does something to a character; this influences his emotional state; he acts upon his feelings. His emotional state then reverts to a more neutral state over time (I was angry half an hour ago, but I've calmed down now), or changes again in response to another sensation. If these systems are really simple they produce absurd results: a character is furious one moment and cheerful a second later, like a Warner Brothers cartoon character. This is the kind of thing you get with finite state machines. This approach doesn't take into account the fact that behavior itself changes emotions. Behavior is not merely an output to be exhibited; it also affects how we feel. It feeds back into our emotional state."

Comments

Don't hurt the feelings of FSMs

[Schiphol]

The summary (and TFA as well) seem to be committed to the following two points:

1. Finite state machines will be unrealistically simple when simulating emotional responses.
2. Behavioural-feedback is a necessary condition for realistic emotional displays.

Point number 1 is unwarranted. Finite state machines may elaborate their input at an arbitrarily high level of complexity -finite may still be very large. Part of such an elaboration, of course, may be inner transitions between states that effectively amount to behavioural-feedback. There is nothing intrinsically un-dynamic to FSM.