The theme of Corvus Elrod’s Round Table for this month (which I may as a tendency take as a general monthly theme) is the role of artificial intelligence in gaming. In this context, as I understand it, AI most often refers to intelligent agents specifically; that is, the decision-making processes behind enemies, allies, social NPCs, and any other game objects meant to project an air of sentience.

I’ve had some small professional experience related to this particular field. The major recurring theme I recall from my study of the disposition of these intelligent agents is this: their human counterparts are, on the one hand, enthusiastic beyond measure to attribute motivation to every random or accidental behavior the agent displays and, on the other hand, consistently unimpressed by any and all intended behaviors.

While frustrating to the designer, this is interesting in what it suggests about how people react to a program attempting to appear intelligent. We are eager to attribute sentience to that which we don’t understand, yet quick to reject this hypothesis when an underlying mechanism peeks through. This makes some sense from an evolutionary standpoint; it is probably safest to assume that anything you don’t understand may potentially wish you ill. But the more knowledge we have about the world, the less we see spirits in it.

The simplest implication for videogames is that greater randomness in the algorithm may contribute to a greater impression of sentience – as in, say, The Sims 2, where conflicting drives and constant random rolls lead to a relatively unpredictable, and vivid, stable of NPCs. Their personalities (such as they are) are just arbitrary numbers, but that may be why they make such an easy target for the feverish imaginations of the players.

But there’s more to it than this, of course. We are equally eager to attribute sentience to characters whose motivations are drawn in a traditionally literary fashion, bypassing algorithms, such as those in Knights of the Old Republic. But this seems intuitively to be a different kind of sentience, and I’m not sure whether it carries over once your exhaustively detailed conversation ends and the battle begins. What is the relationship between AI and character? I’ll leave that question for another night.

For more posts on this topic, please visit the Gaming Blog of the Round Table home page.