Creating Agents that Entertain

Presenter, Hsiu-Chin Lin. Co-authors, Kelly Christoffersen - ICT, Colleen Van Lent - Cal State Long Beach

California State University Long Beach

Date: Saturday, April 19, 2008
Time:
Location: California State University Northridge
Host: Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges

Game AI research is moving away from the creation of dominant computer
agents to the idea of creating agents that focus on entertainment. The
development of a realistic definition of entertainment, or “fun”,
requires a qualitative measure on subjective assessments from a large,
diverse field of participants. We present our work in the early stages
of creating a web-based system for testing different opponent behaviors.
We have augmented the Link4 game to compete again human players using
three different opponent strategies. Human players will rank the
entertainment value of these agents, as well as personal information
that may affect their ranking. This paper describes the simple behaviors
we have coded for testing purposes and the challenge of capturing user
the experience while not detracting from it.