Cleverly stupid game AIs

[prog]

I read a good article in Game Developer last night about building weak AIs (automated opponents) that maximize the fun for the human player. The upshot was a recommendation to rely less on stunting the AI's allowed computation time, or clouding its actions with random variances, and more on having the AI intentionally and subtly providing the

Comments

[kahuna_burger]

Heh, this kind of reminds me of a link you had a while back about "how to cheat at kids' games" with the point of cheating be to give the kids the win regularly. I think the HoMM series could have benifited from this sort of thinking - on the easy levels it was barely worth finishing a game because your advantage got proportionally larger as things progressed. But the harder levels were too punishing at the outset for me to enjoy.

[prog]

It really is literally letting the poor pathetic human win, but trying your hardest to make it look like you're not. In the case of the billiards game, the computer gets to use its total mastery of game-universe physics to do so. "Oh - look where the ball landed! Lucky you!" I love it.

[cortezopossum]

I had two professors who would often play each other on one of the billiards tables at the student union game room. They were both extremely polite to each other and you could often tell that if one was losing badly the other would play a significantly weaker game until the the first one caught up.

This talk reminds me of the game 'Oddworld' where you could sometimes defeat guards by talking to them. If they couldn't see you, you keep jamming away at the speech buttons the guard would get more and more upset that he could hear you but not see you. Eventually the guard would get so upset it would run off the edge of a cliff and die.

[kahuna_burger]

I know a lot of people play games to be competitive and would resent that behavior, but for myself it sounds quite nice. I play games to enjoy the game while it's going on and "the thrill of victory" is a minor endnote. Blowouts aren't fun for me whether I'm winning or losing.

[chocorisu]

It's definitely more interesting to model an AI agent slipping up rather than just being stupid. Hard to get right though, especially in action games, cause there's always that danger of feeling like the computer is screwing with you. You want that sense of fiero from winning a fair fight and--for me, at least--I get none of it when I sense the computer is holding back. Be very cautious of adaptive difficulty for that reason.

[kahuna_burger]

But, really, isn't the computer is ALWAYS holding back in order for you to win?

[chocorisu]

Sure, but when you choose the difficulty of the game you're agreeing up front how hard the game is going to be. Adaptive difficulty is moving the goalposts.

[kahuna_burger]

Hrm, I thought the idea was that it would adapt within certain limits depending on the difficulty level. The Fitz example said it did the adaptive weakness when set for a gentle difficulty level.

I don't think the point of adaptive difficulty is to remove difficulty levels, it's to make the full range of them more fun. As I mentioned with HoMM, lower difficulty levels can be tedious if done badly.