Project Name: Believable Character Behaviors And Stories In Story-based Games

Project Leader

Duane Szafron

Project Co-Leader

Magy Seif El-Nasr

Researchers

• David Mould (Carleton)
• Jonathan Schaeffer (Alberta)
• Magy El-Nasr (SFU)
• Duane Szafron (Alberta)
• Michael Bowling (Alberta)
• Mike Carbonaro (Alberta)
• Sean Gouglas (Alberta)

Theme Distribution

• Theme 1 : 5%
• Theme 2 : 65%
• Theme 3 : 5%
• Theme 4 : 5%
• Theme 5 : 20%

Project Description

Our industrial partner, BioWare is the world leader in story-based computer/video games, such as Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars, Knights of the Old Republic. One of the major bottlenecks in computer games is scripting. Scripts control the interactions of objects (content) in a computer game similar to the way that a movie script dictates character actions and stage directions in a movie. As the complexity of game production has increased, specialization of skills has occurred in the industry and most game story authors today have little or no computer programming (or scripting) skill. Either an author dictates story details to a programmer, who writes scripts or a technical designer is used as an intermediary. In either case, vague requirements and miscommunication between authors and script programmers produce errors and delays. Scripts dictate game agent behavior and our first goal is to discover new mechanisms that allow game designers to create helpful allies and challenging opponents by generating these scripts automatically in an environment where the authors provide creative high-level direction to the agents. We propose a multi-queue behavior architecture that provides support for prioritized interruptible-resumable independent and collaborative behaviors. We will also construct a prototype implementation that uses a commercial game, BioWare Corp.s Neverwinter Nights. We will then conduct a series of user studies to discover whether non-programmers can quickly and reliably produce believable behaviors. Scripts are also essential in controlling the plot in story-based games and our second goal is to ensure that game designers can use this creative environment to generate scripts that ensure player actions influences the plot and that the plot points occur in a rational order during the story. Our approach will be to provide authors with a library of high-level behaviour and plot patterns (game story idioms) that they can adapt for the story at hand. We will use and adapt the latest techniques from machine learning, natural language processing, visual programming languages, software engineering, human computer interaction, game studies, perception and cognition (Cutumisu et al, 2008; Gorniak & Davis, 2007). However, it is the novel interaction of these techniques in this domain that provides the greatest opportunities for new research insights. In addition to the research, we will develop an environment that can be used by game designers, professional or amateur - such as high school students, who can use this environment to focus on the creative aspects of constructing believable characters and stories. We will validate this environment both with user studies and with feedback from our industrial partner, BioWare.

Excellence of the Research

Development of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP)

This project will provide a balanced experience for students. They will conduct research, gain software design experience in building real-time software on the latest hardware, design interfaces that can be used by non-programers (writers, artists and musicians) and evaluate their newly discovered techniques by designing and performing user studies and case studies in the context of real computer games.

Networking and Partnerships

We have had an excellent relationship with BioWare and Electronic Arts for five years. Besides providing access to BioWare programmers and designers who provide extensive feedback on our research, they hire our graduates who influence game design based on the research they conducted as graduate students. In addition, BioWare provided us with the valuable source code to their multi-award winning game "Neverwinter Nights" to help us conduct our research in the context of a real game. Providing source code for a commercial game engine is very rare, since game studios rely on this intellectual property to survive. Nevertheless, we have established a level of trust and mutual respect that allowed them to put this multi-million dollar asset in our hands.

Knowledge and Technology Exchange and Exploitation

This innovation will directly enable the industrial partner, BioWare to remain the world's leading game studio for story-based video games. In the fast-changing market driven industry of video games, remaining the best is as difficult as becoming the best. Without research like this, BioWare would be more susceptible to losing its advantage to U.S. or European studios. Although not yet as recognized as they should be, the writers and artists in the video game industry are having an increasing impact on art and culture in today's society. Enabling a Canadian-based company to maintain its the world-wide lead in story-based games will have social and cultural benefits in addition to the obvious economic benefits.

References to the Literature

Cutumisu, M., Szafron, D., Bowling, M. and Sutton, R.S. (2008). Agent Learning using Action-Dependent Learning Rates in Computer Role-Playing Games, "Proceedings of the Fourth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE-2008)", Palo Alto, USA, October 2008, pp. 22-29

Gorniak, P. and Davis I. (2007). SquadSmart: Hierarchical Planning and Coordinated Plan Execution for Squads of Characters. "In Proceedings of Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE)", 2007, 14-19.

Publications

Presentations

• 2 Minute Madness 2010