May 7th, 2018

AI Wish List from GDC

AI Wish List: What Do Designers Want out of AI? – GDC Vault

GDC Talk with Raph Koster, Dave Mark, Richard Lemarchand, Laralyn McWilliams, Noah Falstein, and Robin Hunicke. They go over what directions they would like AI to move in in the future to further good game development.

Some Topics Discussed:

• Content Creation: Don’t focus on procedurally generating a tree, or a forest of trees. Generate interestingly varied trees that have other interactive elements within/about them to create a much more detail-rich environment that could not be created by human hands in any practical way. Create a world, with a forest, with a pond, with tadpoles that you can interact with.
• Feelings to Invoke: Feeling Proud for something. Have the player feel proud that they were able to guide something else to perform an action on its own.
• Create systems of interactivity that decentralize the player. Make the player understand that their actions are upsetting a balance. Make the player see that their actions affect other lives, even NPC lives.
  Example: A player arrives at a procedurally generated world with procedurally generated pink moles that have built up an entire ecosystem and have a history. These moles will then react to the player arriving and their actions/decisions, but also carry on with their own lives, which they would have done regardless of whether a player ever arrived or not.