Trigger Happy
A fascinating corollary of this arm’s-length approach—set it up and let it roll—is that what happens in the videogame, though not random, then becomes highly unpredictable. This idea is seconded at Core Design’s development studios, during the early stages of work on a beautiful PlayStation2 game that requires the player to herd eccentric cartoon wildlife. Never mind the humans; every creature in the forest, from insects to deer and cows, has its own specific web of AI algorithms. And this complexity leads to very rich and varied possibilities of behavior. “We may have written the game,” a programmer insists with amazed pride at his creation, “but we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
These developments are analogous to Mathengine’s work on the physical modeling of dynamic properties. And just as convincing feelings of bounciness, heft or inertia in virtual objects increase the aesthetic pleasure of the game, so will more convincing simulations of other wills, whether enemy or ally. The Holy Grail now for story-led videogames is nothing less than the physical modeling of personality.
Yes, this sounds like a tall order. But note that we do not need to believe in the cognitive science project
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