Artificial Intelligence - What Are Non-Player Characters And Emergent Gameplay?

 

Emergent gameplay occurs when a player in a video game encounters complicated scenarios as a result of their interactions with other players in the game.

Players may fully immerse themselves in an intricate and realistic game environment and feel the consequences of their choices in today's video games.

Players may personalize and build their character and tale.

Players take on the role of a cyborg in a dystopian metropolis in the Deus Ex series (2000), for example, one of the first emergent game play systems.

They may change the physical appearance of their character as well as their skill sets, missions, and affiliations.

Players may choose between militarized adaptations that allow for more aggressive play and stealthier options.

The plot and experience are altered by the choices made on how to customize and play, resulting in unique challenges and results for each player.

When players interact with other characters or items, emergent gameplay guarantees that the game environment reacts.

Because of many options, the tale unfolds in surprising ways as the gaming world changes.

Specific outcomes are not predetermined by the designer, and emergent gameplay can even take advantage of game flaws to generate actions in the game world, which some consider to be a form of emergence.

Artificial intelligence has become more popular among game creators in order to have the game environment respond to player actions in a timely manner.

Artificial intelligence aids the behavior of video characters and their interactions via the use of algorithms, basic rule-based forms that help in generating the game environment in sophisticated ways.

"Game AI" refers to the usage of artificial intelligence in games.

The most common use of AI algorithms is to construct the form of a non-player character (NPC), which are characters in the game world with whom the player interacts but does not control.

In its most basic form, AI will use pre-scripted actions for the characters, who will then concentrate on reacting to certain events.

Pre-scripted character behaviors performed by AI are fairly rudimentary, and NPCs are meant to respond to certain "case" events.

The NPC will evaluate its current situation before responding in a range determined by the AI algorithm.

Pac-Man is a good early and basic illustration of this (1980).

Pac-Man is controlled by the player through a labyrinth while being pursued by a variety of ghosts, who are the game's non-player characters.

Players could only interact with ghosts (NPCs) by moving about; ghosts had limited replies and their own AI-programmed pre-scripted movement.

The AI planned reaction would occur if the ghost ran into a wall.

It would then roll an AI-created die that would determine whether or not the NPC would turn toward or away from the direction of the player.

If the NPC decided to go after the player, the AI pre-scripted pro gram would then detect the player’s location and turn the ghost toward them.

If the NPC decided not to go after the player, it would turn in an opposite or a random direction.

This NPC interaction is very simple and limited; however, this was an early step in AI providing emergent gameplay.

Contemporary games provide a variety of options available and a much larger set of possible interactions for the player.

Players in contemporary role-playing games (RPGs) are given an incredibly high number of potential options, as exemplified by Fallout 3 (2008) and its sequels.

Fallout is a role-playing game, where the player takes on the role of a survivor in a post-apocalyptic America.

The story narrative gives the player a goal with no direction; as a result, the player is given the freedom to play as they see fit.

The player can punch every NPC, or they can talk to them instead.

In addition to this variety of actions by the player, there are also a variety of NPCs controlled through AI.

Some of the NPCs are key NPCs, which means they have their own unique scripted dialogue and responses.

This provides them with a personality and provides a complexity through the use of AI that makes the game environment feel more real.

When talking to key NPCs, the player is given options for what to say, and the Key NPCs will have their own unique responses.

This differs from the background character NPCs, as the key NPCs are supposed to respond in such a way that it would emulate interaction with a real personality.

These are still pre-scripted responses to the player, but the NPC responses are emergent based on the possible combination of the interaction.

As the player makes decisions, the NPC will examine this decision and decide how to respond in accordance to its script.

The NPCs that the players help or hurt and the resulting interactions shape the game world.

Game AI can emulate personalities and present emergent gameplay in a narrative setting; however, AI is also involved in challenging the player in difficulty settings.

A variety of pre-scripted AI can still be used to create difficulty.

Pre scripted AI are often made to make suboptimal decisions for enemy NPCs in games where players fight.

This helps make the game easier and also makes the NPCs seem more human.

Suboptimal pre-scripted decisions make the enemy NPCs easier to handle.

Optimal decisions however make the opponents far more difficult to handle.

This can be seen in contemporary games like Tom Clancy’s The Division (2016), where players fight multiple NPCs.

The enemy NPCs range from angry rioters to fully trained paramilitary units.

The rioter NPCs offer an easier challenge as they are not trained in combat and make suboptimal decisions while fighting the player.

The military trained NPCs are designed to have more optimal decision-making AI capabilities in order to increase the difficulty for the player fighting them.

Emergent gameplay has evolved to its full potential through use of adaptive AI.

Similar to prescript AI, the character examines a variety of variables and plans about an action.

However, unlike the prescript AI that follows direct decisions, the adaptive AI character will make their own decisions.

This can be done through computer-controlled learning.

AI-created NPCs follow rules of interactions with the players.

As players go through the game, the player interactions are analyzed, and some AI judgments become more weighted than others.

This is done in order to provide distinct player experiences.

Various player behaviors are actively examined, and modifications are made by the AI when designing future challenges.

The purpose of the adaptive AI is to challenge the players to a degree that the game is fun while not being too easy or too challenging.

Difficulty may still be changed if players seek a different challenge.

This may be observed in the Left 4 Dead game (2008) series’ AI Director.

Players navigate through a level, killing zombies and gathering resources in order to live.

The AI Director chooses which zombies to spawn, where they will spawn, and what supplies will be spawned.

The choice to spawn them is not made at random; rather, it is based on how well the players performed throughout the level.

The AI Director makes its own decisions about how to respond; as a result, the AI Director adapts to the level's player success.

The AI Director gives less resources and spawns more adversaries as the difficulty level rises.

Changes in emergent gameplay are influenced by advancements in simulation and game world design.

As virtual reality technology develops, new technologies will continue to help in this progress.

Virtual reality games provide an even more immersive gaming experience.

Players may use their own hands and eyes to interact with the environment.

Computers are growing more powerful, allowing for more realistic pictures and animations to be rendered.

Adaptive AI demonstrates the capability of really autonomous decision-making, resulting in a truly participatory gaming experience.

Game makers are continuing to build more immersive environments as AI improves to provide more lifelike behavior.

These cutting-edge technology and new AI will elevate emergent gameplay to new heights.

The importance of artificial intelligence in videogames has emerged as a crucial part of the industry for developing realistic and engrossing gaming.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Brooks, Rodney; Distributed and Swarm Intelligence; General and Narrow AI.

Further Reading:

Brooks, Rodney. 1986. “A Robust Layered Control System for a Mobile Robot.” IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation 2, no. 1 (March): 14–23.

Brooks, Rodney. 1990. “Elephants Don’t Play Chess.” Robotics and Autonomous Systems6, no. 1–2 (June): 3–15.

Brooks, Rodney. 1991. “Intelligence Without Representation.” Artificial Intelligence Journal 47: 139–60.

Dennett, Daniel C. 1997. “Cog as a Thought Experiment.” Robotics and Autonomous Systems 20: 251–56.

Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pfeifer, Rolf, and Josh Bongard. 2007. How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Artificial Intelligence - AI And Post-Scarcity.

 

Post-scarcity is a controversial idea about a future global economy in which a radical abundance of products generated at low cost utilizing sophisticated technologies replaces conventional human labor and wage payment.

Engineers, futurists, and science fiction writers have proposed a wide range of alternative economic and social structures for a post-scarcity world.

Typically, these models rely on hyperconnected systems of artificial intelligence, robotics, and molecular nanofactories and manufacturing to overcome scarcity—an pervasive aspect of current capitalist economy.

In many scenarios, sustainable energy comes from nuclear fusion power plants or solar farms, while materials come from asteroids mined by self-replicating smart robots.

Other post-industrial conceptions of socioeconomic structure, such as the information society, knowledge economy, imagination age, techno-utopia, singularitarianism, and nanosocialism, exist alongside post-scarcity as a material and metaphorical term.

Experts and futurists have proposed a broad variety of dates for the transition from a post-industrial capitalist economy to a post-scarcity economy, ranging from the 2020s to the 2070s and beyond.

The "Fragment on Machines" unearthed in Karl Marx's (1818–1883) unpublished notebooks is a predecessor of post-scarcity economic theory.

Advances in machine automation, according to Marx, would diminish manual work, cause capitalism to collapse, and usher in a socialist (and ultimately communist) economic system marked by leisure, artistic and scientific inventiveness, and material prosperity.

The modern concept of a post-scarcity economy can be traced back to political economist Louis Kelso's (1913–1991) mid-twentieth-century descriptions of conditions in which automation causes a near-zero drop in the price of goods, personal income becomes superfluous, and self-sufficiency and perpetual vacations become commonplace.

Kelso advocated for more equitable allocation of social and political power through democratizing capital ownership distribution.

This is significant because in a post-scarcity economy, individuals who hold capital will also own the technologies that allow for plenty.

For example, entrepreneur Mark Cuban has predicted that the first trillionaire would be in the artificial intelligence industry.

Artificial intelligence serves as a constant and pervasive analytics platform in the post-scarcity economy, harnessing machine productivity.

AI directs the robots and other machinery that transform raw materials into completed products and run other critical services like transportation, education, health care, and water supply.

At practically every work-related endeavor, field of industry, and line of business, smart technology ultimately outperform humans.

Traditional professions and employment marketplaces are becoming extinct.

The void created by the disappearance of wages and salaries is filled by a government-sponsored universal basic income or guaranteed minimum income.

The outcomes of such a situation may be utopian, dystopian, or somewhere in the between.

Post-scarcity AI may be able to meet practically all human needs and desires, freeing individuals up to pursue creative endeavors, spiritual contemplation, hedonistic urges, and the pursuit of joy.

Alternatively, the aftermath of an AI takeover might be a worldwide disaster in which all of the earth's basic resources are swiftly consumed by self-replicating robots that multiply exponentially.

K. Eric Drexler (1955–), a pioneer in nanotechnology, coined the phrase "gray goo event" to describe this kind of worst-case ecological calamity.

An intermediate result might entail major changes in certain economic areas but not others.

According to Andrew Ware of the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER), AI will have a huge impact on agriculture, altering soil and crop management, weed control, and planting and harvesting (Ware 2018).

According to a survey of data compiled by the McKinsey Global Institute, managerial, professional, and administrative tasks are among the most difficult for an AI to handle—particularly in the helping professions of health care and education (Chui et al. 2016).

Science fiction writers fantasize of a society when clever machines churn out most material items for pennies on the dollar.

The matter duplicator in Murray Leinster's 1935 short tale "The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator" is an early example.

Leinster invents a duplicator-unduplayer that takes use of the fact that the four-dimensional world (the three-dimensional physical universe plus time) has some thickness.

The technology snatches fragments from the past and transports them to the present.

Pete Davidson, who inherits the equipment from his inventor uncle, uses it to reproduce a banknote put on the machine's platform.

The note stays when the button is pressed, but it is joined by a replica of the note that existed seconds before the button was pressed.

Because the duplicate of the bill has the same serial number, this may be determined.

Davidson uses the equipment to comic effect, duplicating gold and then (accidentally) removing pet kangaroos, girlfriends, and police officers from the fourth dimension.

With Folded Hands (1947) by Jack Williamson introduces the Humanoids, a species of thinking black mechanicals who serve as domestics, doing all of humankind's labor and adhering to their responsibility to "serve and obey, and defend men from danger" (Williamson 1947, 7).

The robots seem to be well-intentioned, but they are slowly removing all meaningful work from human humans in the village of Two Rivers.

The Humanoids give every convenience, but they also eliminate any human risks, such as sports and alcohol, as well as any motivation to accomplish things for themselves.

Home doorknobs are even removed by the mechanicals since people should not have to make their own entries and exits.

People get anxious, afraid, and eventually bored.

For a century or more, science fiction writers have envisaged economies joined together by post-scarcity and vast possibility.

When an extraterrestrial species secretly dumps a score of matter duplicating machines on the planet, Ralph Williams' novella "Business as Usual, During Alterations" (1958) investigates human greed.

Each of the electrical machines, which have two metal pans and a single red button, is the same.

"A press of the button fulfills your heart's wish," reads a written caution on the duplicator.

It's also a chip embedded in human society's underpinnings.

It will be brought down by a few billion of these chips.

It's all up to you" (Williams 1968, 288).

Williams' narrative is set on the day the gadget emerges, and it takes place in Brown's Department Store.

John Thomas, the manager, has exceptional vision, understanding that the robots would utterly disrupt retail by eliminating both scarcity and the value of items.

Rather of attempting to create artificial scarcity, Thomas comes up with the concept of duplicating the duplicators and selling them on credit to clients.

He also reorients the business to offer low-cost items that can be duplicated in the pan.

Instead of testing humanity's selfishness, the extraterrestrial species is presented with an abundant economy based on a completely different model of production and distribution, where distinctive and varied items are valued above uniform ones.

The phrase "Business as Usual, During Changes" appears on occasion in basic economics course curricula.

In the end, William's story is similar to the long-tail distributions of more specialist products and services described by authors on the economic and social implications of high technology like Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, and Erik Brynjolfsson.

In 1964, Leinster returned with The Duplicators, a short book. In this novel, the planet Sord Three's human civilization has lost much of its technological prowess, as well as all electrical devices, and has devolved into a rough approximation of feudal society.

Humans are only able to utilize their so-called dupliers to produce necessary items like clothing and silverware.

Dupliers have hoppers where vegetable matter is deposited and raw ingredients are harvested to create other, more complicated commodities, but they pale in comparison to the originals.

One of the characters speculates that this may be due to a missing ingredient or components in the feedstock.

It's also self-evident that when poor samples are repeated, the duplicates will be weaker.

The heavy weight of numerous, but poor products bears down on the whole community.

Electronics, for example, are utterly gone since machines cannot recreate them.

When the story's protagonist, Link Denham, arrives on the planet in unduplicated attire, they are taken aback.

"And dupliers released to mankind would amount to treason," Denham speculates in the story, referring to the potential untold wealth as well as the collapse of human civilization throughout the galaxy if the dupliers become known and widely used off the planet: "And dupliers released to mankind would amount to treason." If a gadget exists that can accomplish every kind of job that the world requires, people who are the first to own it are wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

However, pride will turn wealth into a marketable narcotic.

Men will no longer work since their services are no longer required.

Men will go hungry because there is no longer any need to feed them" (Leinster 1964, 66–67).

Native "uffts," an intelligent pig-like species trapped in slavery as servants, share the planet alongside humans.

The uffts are adept at gathering the raw materials needed by the dupliers, but they don't have direct access to them.

They are completely reliant on humans for some of the commodities they barter for, particularly beer, which they like.

Link Denham utilizes his mechanical skill to unlock the secrets of the dupliers, allowing them to make high-value blades and other weapons, and finally establishes himself as a kind of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Humans and uffts equally devastate the environment as they feed more and more vegetable stuff into the dupliers to manufacture the enhanced products, too stupid to take full use of Denham's rediscovery of the appropriate recipes and proportions.

This bothers Denham, who had hoped that the machines could be used to reintroduce modern agricultural implements to the planet, after which they could be used solely for repairing and creating new electronic goods in a new economic system he devised, dubbed "Householders for the Restoration of the Good Old Days" by the local humans.

The good times are ended soon enough, as humans plan the re-subjugation of the native uffts, prompting them to form a Ufftian Army of Liberation.

Link Denham deflects the uffts at first with generous helpings of bureaucratic bureaucracy, then liberates them by developing beer-brewing equipment privately, ending their need on the human trade.

The Diamond Age is a Hugo Award-winning bildungsroman about a society governed by nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, written by Neal Stephenson in 1995.

The economy is based on a system of public matter compilers, which are essentially molecular assemblers that act as fabricating devices and function similarly to K. Eric Drexler's proposed nanomachines in Engines of Creation (1986), which "guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision" (Drexler 1986, 38).

All individuals are free to utilize the matter compilers, and raw materials and energy are given from the Source, a massive hole in the earth, through the Feed, a centralized utility system.

"Whenever Nell's clothing were too small, Harv would toss them in the deke bin and have the M.C. sew new ones for her." 

Tequila would use the M.C. to create Nell a beautiful outfit with lace and ribbons if they were going somewhere where they would see other parents with other girls" (Stephenson 1995, 53).

Nancy Kress's short tale "Nano Comes to Clifford Falls" (2006) examines the societal consequences of nanotechnology, which gives every citizen's desire.

It recycles the old but dismal cliche of humans becoming lazy and complacent when presented with technology solutions, but this time it adds the twist that males in a society suddenly free of poverty are at risk of losing their morals.

"Printcrime" (2006), a very short article initially published in the magazine Nature by Cory Doctorow, who, by no coincidence, releases free works under a liberal Creative Commons license.

The tale follows Lanie, an eighteen-year-old girl who remembers the day ten years ago when the cops arrived to her father's printer-duplicator, which he was employing to illegally create pricey, artificially scarce drugs.

One of his customers basically "shopped" him, alerting him of his activities.

Lanie's father had just been released from jail in the second part of the narrative.

He's immediately inquiring where he can "get a printer and some goop," acknowledging that printing "rubbish" in the past was a mistake, but then whispers to Lanie, "I'm going to produce more printers." There are a lot more printers.

There's one for everyone. That is deserving of incarceration.

That's worth a lot." Makers (2009), also by Cory Doctorow, is about a do-it-yourself (DIY) maker subculture that hacks technology, financial systems, and living arrangements to "find means of remaining alive and happy even while the economy is going down the toilet," as the author puts it (Doctorow 2009).

The impact of a contraband carbon nanotube printing machine on the world's culture and economy is the premise of pioneering cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling's novella Kiosk (2008).

Boroslav, the protagonist, is a popup commercial kiosk operator in a poor world nation, most likely a future Serbia.

He begins by obtaining a standard quick prototyping 3D printer.

Children buy cards to program the gadget and manufacture waxy, nondurable toys or inexpensive jewelry.

Boroslav eventually ends himself in the hands of a smuggled fabricator who can create indestructible objects in just one hue.

Those who return their items to be recycled into fresh raw material are granted refunds.

He is later discovered to be in possession of a gadget without the necessary intellectual property license, and in exchange for his release, he offers to share the device with the government for research purposes.

However, before handing up the gadget, he uses the fabricator to duplicate it and conceal it in the jungles until the moment is right for a revolution.

The expansive techno-utopian Culture series of books (1987–2012) by author Iain M. Banks involves superintelligences living alongside humans and aliens in a galactic civilization marked by space socialism and a post-scarcity economy.

Minds, benign artificial intelligences, manage the Culture with the assistance of sentient drones.

The sentient living creatures in the novels do not work since the Minds are superior and offer all the citizens need.

As the biological population indulges in hedonistic indulgences and faces the meaning of life and fundamental ethical dilemmas in a utilitarian cosmos, this reality precipitates all kinds of conflict.

~ Jai Krishna Ponnappan

Find Jai on Twitter | LinkedIn | Instagram

You may also want to read more about Artificial Intelligence here.

See also: 

Ford, Martin; Technological Singularity; Workplace Automation.

References & Further Reading:

Aguilar-Millan, Stephen, Ann Feeney, Amy Oberg, and Elizabeth Rudd. 2010. “The Post-Scarcity World of 2050–2075.” Futurist 44, no. 1 (January–February): 34–40.

Bastani, Aaron. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism. London: Verso.

Chase, Calum. 2016. The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism. San Mateo, CA: Three Cs.

Chui, Michael, James Manyika, and Mehdi Miremadi. 2016. “Where Machines Could Replace Humans—And Where They Can’t (Yet).” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2016. http://pinguet.free.fr/wheremachines.pdf.

Doctorow, Cory. 2006. “Printcrime.” Nature 439 (January 11). https://www.nature.com/articles/439242a.

Doctorow, Cory. 2009. “Makers, My New Novel.” Boing Boing, October 28, 2009. https://boingboing.net/2009/10/28/makers-my-new-novel.html.

Drexler, K. Eric. 1986. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. New York: Doubleday.

Kress, Nancy. 2006. “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls.” Nano Comes to Clifford Fall and Other Stories. Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press.

Leinster, Murray. 1964. The Duplicators. New York: Ace Books.

Pistono, Federico. 2014. Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy. Lexington, KY: Createspace.

Saadia, Manu. 2016. Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek. San Francisco: Inkshares.

Stephenson, Neal. 1995. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. New York: Bantam Spectra.

Ware, Andrew. 2018. “Can Artificial Intelligence Alleviate Resource Scarcity?” Inquiry Journal 4 (Spring): n.p. https://core.ac.uk/reader/215540715.

Williams, Ralph. 1968. “Business as Usual, During Alterations.” In 100 Years of Science Fiction, edited by Damon Knight, 285–307. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Williamson, Jack. 1947. “With Folded Hands.” Astounding Science Fiction 39, no. 5 (July): 6–45.