Threat Detection - The Irish Videogame Podcast

We also take a bite out of the poisoned apple of open world games. What makes them compelling? How have they developed? What does procedural generation hold in store for ‘fans of the genre’? Have open world games become stale? And most importantly, how can they be fixed?

Download: Episode 25

What is Threat Detection?

Threat Detection is a videogame chat show on Radiomade.ie. Each week, hosts Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal take an hour or two to tear apart a videogame topic, like character, horror, or sex.

Gareth & James get together in the first Threat Detection for a while for a general chat about games. They talk about classic videogame publications like PC Gamer, C&VG and EGM, as well as the revival of classic games on sites like Good Old Games.

Download: Episode 24

What is Threat Detection?

Threat Detection is a videogame chat show on Radiomade.ie. Each week, hosts Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal take an hour or two to tear apart a videogame topic, like character, horror, or sex.

What’s Threat Detection?

Threat Detection is a lively, smart, frequently funny and always irreverent videogame chat show on Radiomade.ie. Each week, hosts Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal take an hour or two to tear apart a videogame topic, like character, horror, or sex.

Download: Threat Detection – Episode 23

In the second part of our A.I. in games double bill, we focus on the companion character of ‘Ellie’ in ‘The Last Of Us’, perhaps the greatest accomplishment in videogame A.I.

What’s Threat Detection?

Threat Detection is a lively, smart, frequently funny and always irreverent videogame chat show on Radiomade.ie. Each week, hosts Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal take an hour or two to tear apart a videogame topic, like character, horror, or sex.

Download: Threat Detection – Episode 22

Why is artificial intelligence hard?

Primarily because we don’t really understand human intelligence. Especially as applied to areas like language and creativity. There’s a mysterious middle-ground between our understanding of what’s happening at a high level (cognitive processes) and low level (individual neuronal signalling). For example, neuroscientists still don’t know for certain whether ideas are distributed (hebbian cell assemblies) or located in individual neuronal cortices.

Traditional research in AI seeks to recreate general intelligence. Projects such as MIT’s Kismet* attempt to create an AI that can learn and interact socially as well as exhibit emotions. At time of writing, MIT is working on developing an embodied AI with the faculties of a young child, a long term project yet to bear fruit.

Natural Intelligence

Natural intelligence is situated, physiologically, socially and environmentally. Evolved adaptive intelligence makes sense only in the context of what biologists call ‘the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness’. In other words, the environment it evolved to suit. Biologist Herbert Simon famously compared intelligence to the blade of a scissor, fitting into the environment it had evolved to process.

Natural intelligence is based on multi-level, dynamic, evolved biological systems. Natural selection applying at the level of the gene, the cell, the biological system, the organ, the individual, the group, the species. Not to mention sexual selection at the individual level.

For smart AI, you need a smart AIE (artificially intelligent environment). What does a smart environment look like? It has properties like mass, friction, location in space. It matches the capacities of it’s AI. It has a cohesive design that fits the affordances of the game universe.

But that’s not all there is to simulating intelligence. What about collective (socially situated intelligence)? AI that communicates – not merely its perception but what it has learned, remembered and predicted. This is how culture develops (even ants have culture by this definition) – even protozoa have (genetically acquired) learning.

Evolving Artificial Intelligence

Genetic algorithms will one day give us smarter game AI. But current progress is incredibly primitive. Today, evolutionary algorithms are sometimes used for procedural level generation or modelling the physical behaviour of characters. Developing genetic algorithms is hard. It requires perfectly specifying a problem space and its attendant fitness function (how to figure out if the problem has been solved). These must be manually implemented for each parameter of every aspect of behaviour required (not to mention play tested, balanced etc).

Emergent gameplay is fun – but only some kinds of emergent gameplay. If an AI fails too stupidly, it’s merely irritating. By contrast if an AI has adapted too well (to a problem space, or the players behaviour behaviour) it’s not fun either! Easily thrashing the player. Another wrinkle is the difficulty of defining ‘fun’ as a fitness function.

Instead, today’s game AI is provided by manually encoding known algorithms. We create problem solving heuristic systems interact in at best a quasi-non-deterministic manner. For example the famous A* Search algorithm for bot pathing. A variety of types of ‘weak AI’ have been developed which enable relatively autonomous decision making in bots and other in-game agents. Simple reflex agents, that act based on perception (no learning or previous knowledge required) – IF I see you, THEN I shoot! Goal based agents – that perceive their environment and act based on goals, with the capacity of learning from whats effective. Utility based agents, similar to goal based agents, but with the added capacity of evaluating states of the world for desirability. Expert systems: simple decision trees, based on pre-existing knowledge, sometimes capable of inferring based on formalised abstractions of existing knowledge. One example of this is Wolfram alpha – an expert system with natural language processing and many curated databases (which helps to power Siri and Google Now).

AI in Games

Early developments involved defined ruleset games in simple universe. The worlds of boardgames like checkers and chess. Since the 1950s chess programmes have been able to regularly beat a majority of non-expert players. Todays home programmes regularly defeat grandmasters. However in some games, like the ancient Chinese game ‘Go’, humans still have the upper hand.

Classic experiments in videogame intelligence include Steve Grand’s ‘Creatures’ series, which simulated intelligence at multiple levels – genetic, classical (pavlovian) and operant conditioning.

What’s Threat Detection?

Threat Detection is a lively, smart, frequently funny and always irreverent videogame chat show on Radiomade.ie. Each week, hosts Gareth Stack & James Van De Waal take an hour or two to tear apart a videogame topic, like character, horror, or sex.

This week – E3, the worlds largest videogame conference

Started in 1995. The first E3 was conceived by IDG’s Infotainment World and co-founded by the Interactive Digital Software Association (now the Entertainment Software Association). It coincided with the start of a new generation of consoles, with the release of the Sega Saturn, and the announcements of upcoming releases of the PlayStation, Virtual Boy and Neo-Geo CD.

Nothing short of fabulous opera being performed by seriously amateur public representatives and corporate heads of the great movers and shakers of the video game industry. Over the last ten years the press conference has grown and moved with the growing profits of the video game business, jumping from Los Angeles convention center, Tokyo in 1996.

What does E3 say about the state of the industry industry?

With the prevalence of bullshots, ‘target renders’ and broken releases – e.g.: WatchDogs, Battlefied 4 – can we trust anything we see?

What are our hopes for the near future of gaming?

Download: Threat Detection – Episode 21

The Best of E3

New Ass Creed – co-op looks incredible, but who will play like this. Will the game’s already low bar difficulty be even more simplified.

HD Zelda on Wii U

Tried to play down any of the new footage – what little there was. Instead focusing on a new focus to freedom of gameplay and an open world to support it.

Alien isolation

Far cry 4

Create a ‘mythic’ template, OTT villain, with story ‘beats’, test in the market, wax rinse repeat. Although, to be fair, co-op looks fun – footage shows a lot of gameplay potential. Multiple ways to approach mission objective, aspects of the environment to play against your enemy. Nice and steady frame rate to keep up to your fast paced shooting and interactive movements.

Mirrors Edge 2 – looks identical to ME2 – seems very early in development.

Star Wars Battlefront

The Last Guardian – MIA but apparently not cancelled

A lot of pre-alpha footage and barely explored concepts but besides some HDified classics there are few big ips coming out this year. Destiny is excused, all hail Destiny.

Tomb Raider Reboot Sequel

The Division – promises incredible co-op, what chance it will deliver.

Rainbow Six – Siege

H1Z1 – looks rubbish thus far.

Grim Fandango remake for PS4 / Vita

No Man’s Sky Gameplay (please dont’ make it PS4 exclusive)

Uncharted 4 ‘Thief’s End’ – 2015 / PS4

GTA 5 – nextgen and PC – improved lighting

Splatoon

Interesting “indies”

Inside – very limbo like 2d sidescrolling stealth puzzler

Valiant Hearts – WW1 Dog based? heartbreaking trailer //maudlin trailer// – not really an indie, coming from Ubisoft Montpellier (Rayman / Zombie U / Beyond Good and evil team)

Cuphead – perfect recreation of 30s animation in a platformer

Hotline Miami 2 level editor

Indie3 – independent indie games at E3.

Download: Threat Detection – Episode 20

Does character matter?

How can it be conveyed in interactive media?

Characters can often be more than their general perspective of first and third person perspective.

Often times the perspective of the character is taken advantage of to better inform a kind of meta narrative or even just to take a more focused and fixed look on the game’s themes (a la Half Life)

Characters can also be unsculpted mounds of marble for the player to not only mold to their tastes but also to have the availability to shift the game engine’s choice of perspective between first and third person.

Will you be the stabby stabby guy, the hammering Yorkshire madman or a resigned and fashionable wizard who flames his enemies.