Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The trick is, how do we convert behavior into mathematics? It isn't quite as
simple as the what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) model of the artists.
(“Make the blue floor in the shadow darker by making the blue darker.�) There is
no simple translation from behaviors into numbers and formulas. (For what it's
worth, I already checked AltaVista's translation tool, Babel Fish. No help there!)
Certainly, researchers have been taking notes, conducting surveys, and accumulat-
ing data for ages. That doesn't help us to model some of the behaviors that as game
developers we find necessary but are so second-nature to us that no researcher has
bothered to measure them.
So we are on our own—left to our own devices, as it were. The best we can do is
to observe the world around us, take our own notes, and conduct our own surveys.
Then, using tools to make expression, calculation, and selection simpler, we can at-
tempt to create our own interface into our hat-wearing Poker player so that he can
proceed to make “interesting choices� as our proxy.
It is my hope that, through this topic, I will be able to suggest to you how to
observe the world and construct those mathematical models and interfaces for
decision making. Will your AI pigs become model swine in all areas of their lives? I
don't know. That's not entirely up to me. However, that result is hopefully going to
be far better than if I were to attempt to paint one for you.
