Last week, part of our team had the chance to attend the AI game dev conference in Paris. This world renowned conference is mostly the result of AiGameDev.com Alex and Petra Champandard’s hard work. Big thanks to them then! Everyone on the team that attended the conference will discuss the conference talks in the coming week or so, but let me tell that these covered a very large breadth of topics ranging from high level inspirational design panels to down to the nuts and bolts of making AI characters behave smarter and more interestingly.

Hey, that's us!

On my part, I’ll spend this post writing about the conference keynote that I found to be both interesting and inspirational; this talk by Bruce Blumberg was titled “Intimate Conversations with Interactive Animated Characters”.

Bruce Blumberg’s is the director of the Synthetic Characters Group at MIT Media Laboratory in Cambridge and is in charge of the Synthetic Animal Team at Blue Fang Studios, developers of World of Zoo (from here on, WoZ) on the Wii and PC. More importantly, Blumberg’s been working on virtual pet’s AI for several years now and he is considered one of the world’s leading experts in the field! Also, he showcased an abstract virtual dog made of simple geometric shapes, and I swear that thing behaved like a real dog! Amazing!

Mr.Blumberg’s talk focused on detailing his work on virtual pet’s AI throughout the years on WoZ and on what it means to create a relationship between the player and a virtual pet. What distinguishes a good pet game from a bad one? How is it that for some virtual pets we end up caring about and other we just leave them dying (when we’re not killing them ourselves)?

The presentation showed how iterative his work has been, from über-computer simulations to expo installations and videogames. At one moment, a video showed an audience reacting to a “alpha wolf”, a wolf puppy simulation: the reactions were astonishing, people wooow-ed and aaahhh-ed almost like during an interaction with an actual pet!

So, what are the secret ingredients Mr.Blumberg mentioned?

• The need to create a “conversation” between the player and the pet, the two need to understand each other, interpret each other’s behaviors and attitudes.

• The player needs to feel that HE is the center of attention, that the virtual pet is  dependent on him to survive/learn/evolve! A clear example: when a dog comes to you holding a stick and asking you to throw it, basically the dog is asking “I need you to play my game, otherwise I’ll be bored” (close enough anyway). Thus, thanks to its owner, the dog is happy and the owner is gratified.

• Obviously, the pet’s behavior needs to be coherent and pertinent; but more precisely, to put it in Mr.Blumberg’s words, it needs to exhibit attention, engagement, and sentience. Basically, you don’t want a pet that doesn’t acknowledge the player’s role,  ignores the player altogether or even acts bored to the player’s input!

I’ll be honest, I had very little time to play World of Zoo but from what I experienced, and despite the game being targeted at a young audience (gameplay is fairly simple), the animal’s behavior were incredibly funny to watch and at no moment I had the impressions to be in front of a “mere” AI. Also, kudos to the wonderful art design (very Wind Waker-y)! All-in-all, it all felt very…natural!

Finally, let me add that Bruce Blumberg is an incredibly talented speaker (like all the other American speakers at the conference, that’s an odd pattern!) who managed to entertain and impress throughout his talk! I hope I’ll have the chance to attend another one of his lectures.

That’s it! Here’s hoping for a chance to work on something involving virtual pets one day, as I believe that they can make for very compelling games or at least, turn any game-world into a far more exciting place to be!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Company Life, Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.