Over the course of the past few weeks of researching different topics and creating a blog in response to questions asked of me, I’ve learnt a great deal and had my perspective changed on quite a few issues. Looking back to the question about should emotive modelling be included for NPC’s, I realise I found myself struggling quite a lot. It wasn’t just a matter of difficulty understanding the question as it turned out to be an issue of whether or not it is suitable and how specific people would view it. I began by trying to research behaviour modelling and how that linked to emotive modelling but felt like I was getting nowhere. It was quite difficult to find information on at first as I found that I was being too specific with my searches. This is when I decided to change my research method and search for any work related to AI and emotions.

I found that the answer I gave in response to the question was pretty open about how I would personally consider emotion modelling in NPC’s for games. I found that the longer I researched into the topic the more fascinating it became and was very interested in the stories of how developers had input emotion into some characters.

By changing how I researched I found that I could get to my answer a lot easier as I was thrown down a path which led to different perceptions that I may have never even considered. This broader view on the situation really helped me to see that by changing the nature of the question slightly whilst researching, we can still come to a conclusion for our original question that was put before us. I know now that in future when i am researching, I will adopt this new method of distorting the question to gain different perspectives on how the question can be answered. So i am sure this will affect all future work.

Another example of my overall experiences with this module is how I took to completing the first question pair. I chose to look into Dieter Ram’s 10 Principles of good design because it interested me that these 10 principles still help guide creators in developing new items for consumers. It baffled me at first and I was confused on how I would visualise these principles in a relevant way. I mentioned in the blog post about how these principles don’t just apply to physical items such as radios but how they also apply to digital work such as websites. “Dieter Rams 10 principles aren’t just applied to physical objects though. Looking at a toaster you know what you’re doing, and this should be the same for a webpage.” This really fascinated me as it gave me an insight into how web developers have to consider so many different possibilities when creating a new website.

Overall I would say that through the module my research methods have slightly changed for the better and will help me to improve upon my work in the future and assist me when I’m feeling stuck on a particular topic.