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.