Non-player Characters Getting More Realistic

Posted on June 8, 2005

The New York Times offers an interesting article about how games are starting to create more sophisticated non-player characters to make games more challeging and interesting.

"As we try to create more immersive experiences, these artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward and this is one of the areas that could really explode," Bing Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game company, said after his talk Wednesday night. "We hope that the folks here start thinking about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics is a feature or sound is a feature."

The New York Times article also discusses Facade, an interactive story where players interact with computer-controlled characters. Facade was first introduced at the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference. Facade will be available as a free download later this summer. Here is a description of Facade from the website:

Facade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research experiment in electronic narrative � an attempt to move beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama. Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed a four year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences a story from a first-person perspective. Facade will be publicly released as a freeware cd-rom / download in early summer 2005.