Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
What she lacked was a way of putting this all into the proper framework and
perspective with the appropriate weights and measures. To select the proper ap-
proaches to these problems, she would have had to accurately weigh how each
factor affected the other children. For example, while she knew that posters and
stickers were valuable for name recognition, she did not know whether those meth-
ods were more or less important than having an “in� to the right social networks.
She didn't even have a way of quantifying the relative merits of posters vs. stickers.
Was one poster worth ten stickers? Twenty? Only five?
She also had no way of assigning values to the general
categories
of serious and
childish issues, much less the value of each individual topic. Simply put, she needed
to crawl inside the brains of typical fifth graders and not just determine what was
important to them on both conscious and subconscious levels, but express
how
important each factor was relative to the other. If she had been able to do this bit of
mental wizardry, she would have been able to then construct a mathematical model
that informed her about what decisions she should make.
Of course, she didn't do this detailed analysis in such an open, scientific way.
Much of it was based on things she would intuit simply from observing the goings
on around her. After all, she's only a 10-year-old girl (although a remarkably
insightful one). Whether the reasons for behavior are conscious or unconscious,
however, there are often ways of probing that layer of abstraction to see what is there.
Most of it is based on the idea of determinism—or cause and effect. Taken as a whole,
the hundreds of causes producing hundreds of effects can be a bit daunting—even
to the point where the fact that there
is
a direct link between things is completely
obscured. Observed and described individually, though, we can start to see how
they all work individually yet combine to work together.
Evidence of these sorts of effects is all around us. The challenge is to take these
observations and convert them into numbers and formulas that we can use. This is
at the heart of the process we must use in crafting behavioral game artificial intelli-
gence (AI). To create an agent that would make the decisions (such as my daughter),
we must also be able to model other aspects of the world (such as her peers). Each
of the components above shows an individual system that could be modeled. When
you put them together, you get bigger and more complex decisions.
In the end, Kathy plotted her course with noble intent and shrewd political
savvy yet came up short of the coveted office of fifth-grade vice president. After all,
she was working uphill… she wasn't one of the “popular kids� and she refused to
promise “ice cream Fridays.�
