A) Behavioural modelling is an important part of NPC development for games. Should emotive modelling be part of that development?

I think for some games emotive modelling is very important, especially in storytelling games and interactive games; where your actions matter. Characters emotions are a part of their personality and could influence your decisions. Until dawn had really good emotive characters that kept you guessing about who the ‘killer’ was and may convince you to kill off certain people, affecting the way you play and remember the game.

When you have set decisions this works very well as they have already thought about the AI’s reaction, however in real play-time with too much options the programmed response would try to find something it recognised and build a reaction from that; not completely understanding what you was trying to do. A good example of this is Facade. The story is based on your communication with the AI and you get to decide what you talk about. The design of the game is very simple apart from the facial expressions of the AI and this is to try and mimic the response from human beings when they understand something. Cleverbot is another good example as it picks up on most of the language used but doesn’t understand more complex language and so can repeat itself or start another conversation.

B) Consider your favourite video game. If it contains AI controlled agents how individualistic are they and there behaviours, and, how might you set about improving them?

Final fantasy would be one of my favourite games, and I feel like you don’t impact the story at all through gameplay. If I was able to communicate with the characters and get response I feel it would be very minimal but could still be a cute idea. For those that love finding out the backstory through exploring it could be a new avenue of the game to enjoy. If the game was to include as much detail it would deter the players from the concept of the game which is battle tactics.

if all the characters were to have individualistic behaviours it would be overlooked by the amount of other aspects the game has. for a lot of work it would be dismissed within a minute so the user can progress to other aspects. I would however improve some of the characters dialect, if they had mentions of locations or people I think it would help me to imagine the world and sense of civilization that the game was set in. Other than this, the main characters have unique personalities and behaviours which are shown throughout the game and I think that the focus works better on them.

I think unless the game is solely focused around the interaction with AI its unnecessary and deters the players attention.

Sources:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/behavioral-

modeling.asphttp://www.interactivestory.net/screenshot5.html

http://www.cleverbot.com