Gameplay in real-time strategy games seems somehow to be confined to a de facto standard where economical micro-management is equally important as combat strategy, if not more important. To enable stronger combat-oriented gameplay without sacrificing other key aspects of the genre, we propose an automated system for scheduling unit training, which we believe may allow the exploration of new paradigms of play. To be accepted by the player, such a system must, among other things, be efficient and reliable, which is a non-trivial task considering the highly dynamic nature of the environment in this genre of games. To overcome such a challenge, we propose a system inspired in the swarm intelligence demonstrated by social insects, namely wasps, and describe its limitations and benefits, based on the evaluation of an implementation of the approach as a modification of the game Warcraft III The Frozen Throne (Blizzard Entertainment, 2003).

In this paper, we apply the idea of testing games by learning interactions with them that cause unwanted behavior of the game to test the competition entries for some of the scenarios of the 2010 StarCraft AI competition. By extending the previously published macro action concept to include macro action sequences for individual game units, by adjusting the concept to the real-time requirements of StarCraft, and by using macros involving specific abilities of game units, our testing system was able to find either weaknesses or system crashes for all of the competition entries of the chosen scenarios. Additionally, by requiring a minimal margin with respect to surviving units, we were able to clearly identify the weaknesses of the tested AIs.

Massive Multiplayer Online Strategy games present several unique challenges to players and designers. There is the need to constantly adapt to changes in the game itself and the need to achieve a certain level of simulation and realism, which typically implies battles involving combat with several distinct armies, combat phases and diferent terrains; resource management which involves buying and selling goods and combining lots of diferent kinds of resources to fund the player's nation and cutthroat diplomacy which dictates the pace of the game. However, these constant changes and simulation mechanisms make a game harder to play, increasing the amount of effort required to play it properly. As some of these games take months to be played, players who become inactive have a negative impact on the game. This work pretends to demonstrate how to create versatile agents for playing Massive Multiplayer Online Turn Based Strategy Games, while keeping close attention to their playing performance. In a test to measure this performance the results showed similar survival performance between humans and AIs.

Hiding and seeking is a cognitive ability frequently demonstrated by humans in both real life and video games. We use machine learning to automatically construct the first computational model of hide/seek behavior in adult humans in a video game like setting. The model is then run generatively in a novel environment and its behavior is found indistinguishable from actual human behavior by a panel of human judges.  In doing so the artificial intelligence agent using the model appears to have passed a version of the Turing test for hiding and seeking.

Characters are a critical part of storytelling and emotion is a vital part of character. Readers generally credit characters with human emotions, and it is these emotions which bring meaning to stories. To computationally construct interesting and meaningful stories we need a model of emotion which allows us to predict characters’ reactions to events in the world. There are many different psychological theories of emotion; the most popular to date for computational applications is the OCC theory. This paper describes a Discrete Event Calculus implementation of the OCC Theory of Emotion. To evaluate our system, we apply it to a selection of Aesop’s fables, and compare the output to the emotions readers expect in the same situations based on a survey.

Interactive Narrative often involves dialogue with virtual dramatic characters. In this paper we compare two kinds of models of character style: one based on models derived from the Big Five theory personality, and the other derived from a corpus-based method applied to characters and films from the IMSDb archive. We apply these models to character utterances for a pilot narrative-based outdoor augmented reality game called Murder in the Arboretum . We use an objective quantitative metric to estimate the quality of a character model, with the aim of predicting model quality without perceptual experiments. We show that corpus-based character models derived from individual characters are often more detailed and specific than personality based models, but that there is a strong correlation between personality judgments of original character dialogue and personality judgments of utterances generated for Murder in the Arboretum that use the derived character models.

Authoring interactive stories where the player is afforded a wide range of social interactions results in a very large space of possible social and story situations. The amount of effort required to individually author for each of these circumstances can quickly become intractable. The social AI system Comme il Faut (CiF) aims to reduce the burden on the author by providing a playable model of social interaction where the author provides reusable and recombinable representations of social norms and social interactions. Motivated through examples from an in-development video game, Prom Week, this paper provides a detailed description of the structures with which CiF represents social knowledge and how this knowledge is employed to simulate social interactions between characters.

Many forms of interactive digital entertainment involve interacting with virtual dramatic characters. Our long term goal is to procedurally generate character dialogue behavior that automatically mimics, or blends, the style of existing characters. In this paper, we show how linguistic elements in character dialogue can define the style of characters in our RPG SpyFeet. We utilize a corpus of 862 film scripts from the IMSDb website, representing 7,400 characters, 664,000 lines of dialogue and 9,599,000 word tokens. We utilize counts of linguistic reflexes that have been used previously for personality or author recognition to discriminate different character types. With classification experiments, we show that different types of characters can be distinguished at accuracies up to 83% over a baseline of 20%. We discuss the characteristics of the learned models and show how they can be used to mimic particular film characters.

This paper describes the creation of a digital improvisational theatre game, called Party Quirks, that allows a human user to improvise a scene with synthetic actors according to the rules of the real-world Party Quirks improv game. The AI actor behaviors are based on our study of communication strategies between real-life actors on stage and the fuzzy concepts that they employ to define and portray characters. This paper describes the underlying fuzzy concepts used to enable reasoning in ambiguous environments, like improv theatre. It also details the development of content for the system, which involved the creation of a system for animation authoring, design for efficient data reuse, and a work flow centered on Google Docs enabling parallel data entry and rapid iteration.

Drama Managers, a specific type of the more general Experience Manager, have become a common subject of study in the interactive narrative literature. With a range of representational and computational approaches, authors have repeatedly developed techniques that enable computers to generate, reason about, and adapt narratives in an interactive virtual setting. In order to fully realize an experience manager, seven representational and computational problems need to be solved, generally on a case-by-case basis. In other words, the choice to use an Experience Manager is the choice to model the design as, and implement solutions to, seven inter-dependent design problems. We explicitly articulate those design problems and provide a number of examples of methods that both motivate the design problems as well as illustrate a range of approaches to solving them.