After a week in Coalbrookdale, near Ironbridge, near Telford playing with iron casting, smelting and liquid metal, my thoughts are much more situated in the natural world than the computerised one. To ease back into my technological side, here's a strange structure which bridges the gap between the two: an animal-controlled version of Pac Man, with crickets acting as ghosts (look for graduation projects from 2003/2004).
From creator Wim van Eck's colleague's blog:
In his project he build a Pacman game, in that the player can play Pacman against real crickets, that controls the ghosts in the Pacman maze. By doing this he analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of real-time behaviour of live animals in comparison to behavior-generating code in computer games.
A very clever approach to examining AI in computer games.
More of a trawl through the bursting RSS feeder exposes that Raph was thinking along similar lines (without the crickets) in an essay he posted about what we need (and should start to expect) from NPC characters. He focuses heavily upon MMOGs, but the points he raises are relevant across the gaming spectrum. Via his blog:
Players objected quite a lot to seeing the fictional dressing stripped away from the modern quest dispenser NPCs in SWG, seeing them as actual metallic terminals. And yet, that's how our NPCs act today anyway. We should swing the pendulum back a little bit. I, and I think many other players, would gladly trade some inconvenience for a world that feels a little less like a pellet dispenser.
There are still a few issues to work out in Eck's project before crickets become the benchmark for in-game AI, however. At one point, a bug shed its skin thus rendering the colour-detection system completely ineffective. Game over. The NPC challenge still remains, and is one of the hardest nuts to crack in the mainstream acceptance of gaming as an artistic and respectable medium.
