Week 8

Week 8: 2006/10/16 – 2006/10/20

Motivational Beliefs, Values and Goals

Eccles, Jacquelynne S., and Allen Wigfield. “Motivational Beliefs, Values and Goals.” Annual Review of Psychology. 53 (2002): 109-132.

Eccles and Wigfied review modern theories for motivation, specifically in relation to beliefs, values, and goals. I found their sections focusing on reasons for engagement and integrating motivation and cognition especially interesting. Intrinsic motivations are a reason for engagement, motivation occurs because of interest in the activity. Eccles and Wigfield present a few theories here: self-determination theory , flow theory, and individual difference of intrinsic motivation. They also presented goal theories which they break down into ego-involved goals, maximizing positive results and minimizing negative results, and task-involved goals, mastering tasks to improve the individual. In the integrating motivation and cognition section the authors present theories about self-efficacy and self-regulation.

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Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life

Grand, Stephen, and Dave Cliff. “Creatures: Entertainment Software Agents with Artificial Life.” Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 1.1 (1998): 39-57.

Grand and Cliff present the work done on the game Creatures where the player interacts in real-time with synthetic creatures in a virtual environment. These creatures have “artificial neural networks for sensory-motor control and learning, artificial biochemistries for energy metabolism and hormonal regulation of behavior, and both the network and the biochemistry are 'genetically' specified to allow for the possibility of evolutionary adaptation through sexual reproduction.” The paper goes on to describe how these functions work. One of the more interesting aspects is how they designed their neural network and brain model. The neural network is divided into nine lobes interconnected by synapses. Each lobe consists of neurons with similar characteristics. The brain model regulates information flow through the lobes. Though it's fairly simple in its construction and is behaviorialist, it provides a logic for how the creature processes information and chooses actions.

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Synthetic Vision and Memory for Autonomous Virtual Humans

Peters, C., and C. O'Sullivan. “ Synthetic Vision and Memory for Autonomous Virtual Humans.” Computer Graphics Forum. 21.4 (2002): 743-753.

Peters and O'Sullivan present a model that combines memory and synthetic vision to give synthetic agents realistic knowledge about the location of objects in the world. Synthetic vision consists of two modes. Distinct vision mode, which false-colors each object with a unique color which is used to look up the object in the scene database. Grouped vision mode objects are false-colored with group colors and is used for lower detail perception and only provides information for visible objects. Since it is unrealistic for memory model to store all objects an agent has come in contact with, filters have been devised to reduce the amount of information stored. The filtering process is done through different types of memory: short-term sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

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Research problems in the use of a shallow Artificial Intelligence model of personality and emotion

Elliot, Clark. “ Research problems in the use of a shallow Artificial Intelligence model of personality and emotion.” Proc. of the 12th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994, Seattle. 9-15.

Largely this article spends less time discussing research problems and more time discussing the work being done by the author. Throughout this he does raise interesting ideas, one of them being that users want to express emotions to a computer given that the computer gives a believable illusion of comprehension. We want to anthropomorphise the computer, or the agents in the virtual environment we're interacting with.

Week 7

Week 7: 2006/10/9 – 2006/10/13

A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions

Perron, Bernard. “A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gamplay Emotions.” Proc. of International DiGRA Conference, 2005, Vancouver.

Perron discusses the emotions that arise from gameplay. There are fiction emotions, empathetic emotions, elicited in the player from the observer's position. There are artifact emotions are the emotions elicited from the technology and imagery used to make the game. These types of emotions are existing definitions taken from the film industry. Perron introduces a new type of emotion, gameplay emotions. He describes gameplay emotions as “the emotions arising from our actions in the game” and “the consequent reactions of the game(-world).” The rest of the article becomes rather repetitive and similar to other articles about emotion. I feel that the important thing is that the creation of synthetic characters has the potential to elicit deeper levels of gameplay emotion.

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Better Game Characters By Design

Isbister, Katherine. Chapter 6. “Better Game Characters By Design” New York: Elsevier, 2005.

In this chapter Isbister the role of body language in social interactions and how it applies to video games. Bodies communicate what our relationships are with others, and aspects of our personalities, current emotions and moods. She comes to a conclusion that the use of movement in games isn't as fully utilized as it could be, and gives some pointers about how to better incorporate movement and body language in video game characters. I find this interesting because there are a lot of applications for this in synthetic character creation. Characters with well developed body language will appear to be more realistic and will be more believable.

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Human-level AI's Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games

Laird, John, and Michael van Lent. “Human-level AI's Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games.” Proc. of the Seventeenth National Conference on artificial Intelligence and Twelfth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2000.

Laird and van Lent discuss the research and innovation possibilities of AI, specifically human-level AI, in computer and video games. Currently in academia development of AI has been split into specialized areas. Though this has been successful, the authors feel that progress toward human-level AI has been ignored. Because of the growing realism in computer games necessitating for more complex behavior and interactions with the characters, thus they feel that this is the ideal environment for development. There are many roles AI plays in video games such as enemies and opponents, partners, support characters to name a few.

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Exploration of Unknown Environments with Motivational Agents

Macedo, Luís, and Amílcar Cardoso. “Exploration of Unknown Environments with Motivational Agents.” Proc. of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems – Vol. 1, 2004, New York.

Macedo and Cardoso discuss exploration of environments and the motivations that drive exploration. The motivations they focus on are surprise, curiosity, and hunger. Their agents have a map of areas they've explored, memory about entities (objects in the world) and plans (tasks). Their motivations are applied to the information they receive about the world and they select the appropriate action based on their motivations and memory. This is all well and fine, but it seems that the motivation aspects were under explored.

Week 6

Week 6: 2006/10/2 - 2006/10/6

Synthetic Characters with Emotional States

Avradinis, Nikos, Themis Panayiotopoulos, and Spyros Vosinakis. "Synthetic Characters with Emotional States." Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Methods and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2004. 505-514.

In this article Avradinis, Panayiotopoulos, and Vosinakis discuss why synthetic characters need to have emotions, and how to create a emotion system in a synthetic character. Emotions are an important part of creating synthetic characters because they need to be able to respond appropriately , and to accomplish this they need an understanding of emotion. The authors give the example of 3D models in a virtual environment. Not only will users expect them to look realistic, but they will expect them to also behave consistently with their own internal attributes as well as outside inputs. To generate these emotions they propose a system based on their work with SimHuman and Carroll Izard's theories about emotion activation. They propose a three layer architecture of cognitive, non-cognitive, and physical layers. Actions are generated in either the cognitive or non-cognitive layers and can be projected (acted) out through the physical layer. A few things they note that their design doesn't implement, and neither do other designs, is the idea of dynamically creating rational processes in the characters as well as spontaneous behavior.

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A Model for Personality and Emotion Simulation

Egges, Arjan, Sumedha Kshirsagar, and Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann. "A Model for Personality and Emotion Simulation." Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2003. 505-514.

In this article the authors express that what is missing from synthetic characters is individuality, what drives them. They present mathematical functions to represent personality, emotional state and emotional state history, and mood, as well as functions to update these categories. Beyond that, there is very little of value in this article.

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Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story

Lazzaro, Nicole. "Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story." XEODesign Inc. 2004.

Lazzaro, in this article, discusses why we play games, what makes playing video games fun, and the emotions these kinds of fun elicit in us. Through her research with XEODesign she has broken fun down into four different categories and the emotions these forms of fun elicit. Hard Fun is the satisfaction that comes from being sufficiently challenged and overcoming that challenge and evokes emotions such as frustration and triumph. Easy Fun is about players discovering the world through immersion, exploration, and adventure. Easy Fun provokes wonder, awe and mystery for these players. Altered States moves the player from one mental state to another, making the player feel different. Finally the People Factor is about the social aspects of video games. Whether it's cooperative team work, or competing against other players, these players derive pleasure and pride from such activities.

Social characters have the potential for playing a role in the enjoyment people get out of playing video games. They could add an additional layers of challenge, exploration, depth and competition to video games.

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Changing personalities: towards realistic virtual characters

Poznanski, Mike, and Paul Thagard. “Changing personalities: towards realistic virtual characters.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, Volum 17, Issue 3, Sept. 2005. 221-241

Poznanski and Thagard discuss their personality model, SPOT (simulating personality over time), that satisfies the needs of both psychology and computer science, namely the game development industry. The criteria they used to design this are: psychological plausibility and realism, simplicity and efficiency, and interesting and varied model behavior. Using the Java Neural Network Simulator (JavaNNS) they’ve implemented a three layer forward feeding neural network. These layers are an input layer, a personality/emotion layer, and an output layer. The layers contain nodes and are connected through links between the nodes. Each node and link has a value, when a situation occurs the input is evaluated through these nodes and corresponding links to determine the characters behavior. The interesting thing about this model is that they’ve also implemented a mechanism that allows the character’s personality to change over time based on the situations the encounter but also take into account their “genetic dispositions”, the personality it started off with. So for example, a person who is disposed to being disagreeable but encounters many positive situations will only be able to obtain a certain level of agreeableness. These personalities, the rate at which they change, and the node and link values are all customizable, allowing each character to be different.