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

At the moment emotive modeling is still in an experimental stage and I think that it can be improved with time because at the moment some games use it to communicate emotions to the user, but the emotive modelling isn’t perfect yet, in games such as undertale the characters seem to have emotions that change due to your actions, for instance killing one of characters brother leads them to try and kill you near the end of the game making it a lot harder to complete the game this makes the player aware that they have made the NPC annoyed and that they are trying to avenge their brother which is pretty human like.

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

GTA V will be my example for this and I believe that they NPC’s react in different ways in different situations, for instance the public will run away if you pull out a gun where as people in cars will drive away or may try and run you over, in the same instance police officers will start to shoot at you, another example would be that if you try to steal from a shop in GTA V some of the shop keepers will actually pull out guns others will give you the money I find that interesting, essentially each NPC has there own reaction in different scenarios depending on who they are this makes the game quite realistic and the NPC’s very individualistic, There aren’t many things to improve with the GTA V AI although sometimes the reactions of citizens makes no sense, for instance sometimes you will fire a gun and people will run towards you instead of running away which makes no sense.

Select one or two examples to discuss the future of human-computer interaction.

One example of human computer interaction would be the phone, over the years phones have become thinner and bigger, to fit the hand of the consumer, the whole point of HCI is so that the computer is intractable and therefore needs to be usable and simple for the user to understand, it should also be obvious what thing does what in a sense because usability is much more important than the design of the product. I think as the years go on the phone will become subject to more and more changes to make it more usable and easier to hold, although most phone in the past couple years have been almost the same, for instance the Iphone 6 and 7 are basically the same but the 7 has no headphone jack which just makes the product harder to use because you need to have apple earphones to use it, just like you need an apple charger making apple more money, whether or not phones are going in the correct direction is up to the consumer but I thing Samsung are sticking to the basic phone and improving it in a better way.

Discuss the application of user research methods in games design. Reflect upon the role of the games designer in this context. Can we anticipate player behavior?

We can anticipate player behavior, this can be seen in a lot of FPS games and in GTA where if the user is pointing the general direction of an enemy the the guns sight auto locks onto the enemy making it a lot easier to aim at them, there is also cases of this in the witcher 3 where if you are riding a horse it will stay on track as long as you move forward, which is not the case in most games where you would just go off track if you didn’t pay attention to the game, which in a way makes the game less enjoyable in my opinion because things like fast travel and auto travel just make it so that the player cant explore, but instead is just taken from mission to mission without actually being able to emerge themselves in the world that the creators of the game put time into developing, overall i believe we can anticipate player behavior but some times its better to just let the player be.

Choose one of the indie designers / developers and outline why there work and approach is of interest to you.

The indie designer I have chosen is Toby Fox for his work on Undertale, he stood out to me because he created the entire game alone along with a full sound track and graphics, although the graphics in the game aren’t the best for a game that came out in 2015, the whole game was made in the game engine “Game maker: Studio” and is available on multiple platforms including PS4, PS Vita and PC. I found it really interesting that he wanted to develop a role playing game that was different to the standard RPG that he said he found boring, he wanted likable and interesting characters and that “utilizes the medium as a storytelling device … instead of having the story and game play abstractions be completely separate”. Another thing that I like about Toby is that he decided to work on his game independently to avoid relying on others, this may have been the reason that the game took 2.7 years to create but I respect him for making the entire game independently. He even said that if he where to have an entire art team the character design would stay the same because he found that “there’s a psychological thread that says audiences become more attached to characters drawn simply rather than in detail” which I found very interesting.

(Toby Fox in top pic)

What do you think could be one of the most exciting indie projects that are in development?

One of the most exciting indie projects in development for me is probably TUNIC which is supposed to be released in 2018, not much about the game is known at the moment but after watching some clips of the game and an interview with the developer Andrew Shouldice, I am excited to play the game when it is released, it is a gorgeous Zelda type adventure game with the main character being a fox, There is only one trailer from E3 last year and the graphics look stunning, the game play smooth and the mechanics of the character seem to be fast and smooth from the trailer, although some games like No mans sky have made up things about there games at E3 and other game events so its best to not get your hopes too high. Essentially the game is about a small fox in a big world who is exploring the wilderness, discovering spooky ruins and fighting creatures from long ago, its soon to be released on most platforms such as PS4 XBOX ONE and PC.

Select one example to outline the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre?

One of the key concepts of the interactive narrative genre is that the consumer of the product has some kind of control over what is to happen in said circumstances, for instance actions made in the product can change the overall outcome of the product, for example in some role playing games the choices you select along the way can change the ending or what tasks/missions you must complete in order to finish the game some making the game longer and some making the game shorter, for instance making the choice to do all the side quests in a game instead of just sticking to the main story can result in many more hours of game play instead of a short play through. Although this can be in interactive games it can also be used in other types of media such as books where the audience is told to go to a different page for each answer or choice made overall resulting in a different ending, this is mostly found in children books but can be found in some adult/teen based demographic books too.

Does the interactive narrative still have a role to play in video games today. Give examples?

Interactive narrative still has a role in games such as role playing games, some good examples being Undertale where your decisions to kill or be peaceful change almost every aspect of the game, for example if you where to kill a certain character early on in the game then you have to fight their friends later on making the game a lot harder, also one funny thing in Undertale is that if you don’t buy cookies from a spider early on you need to fight a spider queen which is stupidly hard, I thing that is a good example of interactive narrative, Another good example is the game GTA V, this is a AAA title game in which the player has a lot of side tasks and main missions to complete but the big choice that the player makes is at the end of the game where you have to choose which character too kill each resulting in a different ending, the best being if you are able to not kill any of the three main characters. These type of game changing choices can be found in games like fallout 3 where there is a karma system in which the more bad things you do the worse karma you obtain, meaning less people will help you and you cant join certain groups which can make the game a lot more difficult.

What does avant garde mean?

Avant garde is a term that is used to describe artists and work that is experimental, radical or unorthodox with respect to art, culture and society. essentially work that is out of the box and out of the ordinary, avant garde is considered to be the hallmark of modernism by some artists. In french the term avant gaurd means vanguard or the advanced guard , essentially the peoples ideas are ahead of their time this is sometimes seen in movements in the art such as dadaism or in politics anarchism. The term can also be used to describe something that is cutting edge or something people are new too. usually the art work done by such artists is made to challenge the norm in today’s media, meaning to try and break the boundaries set by society too of what you are able and unable to create. The movement was created in the early 20th century by the artist Dada. The movement was originally created by Dada because of his disgust towards the social, political and cultural values of the time especially the horrors of the first world war, Dada’s work cause massive outrage leading to one of his exhibitions to be closed by police due to his work challenging the norms of society. The avant garde movement was created in France and lead from one artist challenging society to an entire movement of artists and this is now a term used by artists in many countries across the world, this shows how much impact a single artist can have.

(Art by dada on right)

Is it still possible to be truly ‘avant garde’?

I don’t believe that it is still possible to be avant garde in current games because of social boundaries that people are too scared to cross, for instance games like GTA have been banned in countries such as Australia because of extreme violence and so on which is why I believe that games like that may not sell as well as games that don’t have that kind of themes, as a game producer I would like to try and make my game socially acceptable and a game that all people can play in every country without fear of it being banned or having a bad name. I also believe that it would be hard to be avant garde in this day since most games seem extremely similar, this is probably because most games are just different versions of the same thing, like the fact that every MMO RPG just seems like the same quest after quest boredom, nothing really seems new anymore to me.

What do you see as the positives and negatives around copyright?

I think that copyright is a positive thing because it protects creators from people out right stealing their hard work and earning revenue for something they had no part in creating, although on the flip side I believe that copyright can also be a negative thing because as seen in some commentary videos on you tube such as H3H3’s video, which came under the fair use act on you tube but was taken down due to copyright, there was a lawsuit and H3H3 won and created FUPA (Fair Use Protection Account) to help other content creators who are having videos taken down unfairly. I think that copyright is a positive thing but is used and unfairly and negatively by some people and overall just makes it hard to create something new. it is also hard to prove that something is yours unless you own a company or something. In a scenario where a big company steals from a small time indie creator the copyright law is there to help the smaller indie creator take back what is his.

is possible to make anything new? 

I believe that it is possible to make something new, but its just a lot harder to do so with copyright, in a sense everything belongs to some one and unless they have been dead for a certain amount of years the use of there product requires the creators consent, this makes it very difficult for indie creators to make any thing due to there presence not being very known making it harder for them to reach creators of certain products. An example would be “everything that can be invented has been invented.” – Charles H. Duell, he said this in 1899 and obviously many more things where invented after that point, in this sense I believe that we can still create something new, it just has to be original, which is very hard to do when everything we have belongs to someone else.

(Charles H. Duell was the Commissioner of US patent office in 1899. Mr. Deull’s most famous attributed utterance is that “everything that can be invented has been invented.”)