Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual

Trigger Happy

characters. And just as it is largely the interactions between people that make a story interesting, so a good storytelling videogame ought to simulate believable exchanges between characters.

Character interactions can happen in cut-scenes as much as the designer likes, but a greater feeling of being immersed in the videogame world would naturally result if other characters reacted to the player’s actions in a real-time, organic sense. Outcast is one game that is just beginning to scale this computational mountain. It is a problem of AI, of artificial intelligence: how do you make the computergenerated characters behave in a convincingly lifelike fashion?

Masclef’s solution was found in the AI theories of Marvin Minsky. Outcast’s “Gaia” computational engine uses Minsky’s concept of “agents.” These are little mental homunculi with specialized jobs: one agent is for hunger, another agent is for curiosity, another is for fear, and so on. Weave enough of these agents together and you have a fairly crude model of a consciousness, but one that leads to surprisingly complex sets of behavior. In Outcast the effects, though rudimentary, are enjoyable to see. As Masclef describes it: “Say you make a big noise. If its agent of

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