The Game That Never Was

Gamasutra: The History and Theory of Sandbox Gameplay

So I learned that “sandbox” is the name for what I’m thinking about. And I’m not the first to think about it. Surprise, surprise.

The main reason that this trend towards believable characters is compelling for sandbox play is that the characters are, at bottom, more dynamic and interactable. They help “sell” the game world because they seem more realistic. Not “realistic” in the sense that they can ever hope to pass the Turing test, but realistic enough that they’ll lull you into forgetting about their artificiality. The more intelligently the NPCs respond, the more the game feels like a free and open world.

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Simulated Intelligence

Let me first get some naming right. I will call the area that I intend to focus on “Simulated Intelligence” instead of “Artificial Intelligence.” I do this because what I will do here is not the real hard science that tries to build machines that really act like humans do, that have properties that qualify as real intelligence. I’m not trying to write software that could pass the Turing Test, I’m not even going into that broad direction. My idea is to create software (more specifically software components, vertical prototypes or whatever) which is a sufficient simulation of intelligence to create a good gaming experience.

In order to create a real AI, I would have to delve into Cognitive Science, trying to figure out who a mind works. I have not even the slightest clue how to do that, nor do I have the capabilities (for example access to medical equipment to “look” into someone’s brain, or the ability to make extensive surveys to do black box probing of the brain and extract interesting fact using statistical analysis). Instead I just pick up the research results of some real scientists, bend and abuse them and see if I can make some interesting use of them. You might want to call it “Applied Cognitive Science,” but I think that’s already more credit than it deserves.

So what exactly am I trying to achieve? Read the rest of this entry »

Mental compass

After reading Hofstadter’s book a bit, in becomes more and more clear into which direction I should go. Artificial intelligence has been a topic of interest to me for a long time. Especially playing with the algorithm used to implement programs like copycat or jumbo has been something I wanted to do when I read the book the first time, though I never did it.

Of course I do not think that I can scale that thing up to create an AI that is smart enough to be a sufficient simulation of a human mind or just a NPC’s mind. More like a “decision engine” that tells what to do next based on some input, not unlike more traditional, rule based systems. But I have the faint hope that it could be more flexible and yield more natural results. Perhaps it could also be more resistant against deadlocks and infinite loops. Also I do not intend to use it for ultra complex subjects like dialogs (at least not right now, perhaps when I’m old and gray). I think the approach can be used in more abstract scenarios like building and populating towns. Well, we’ll see.

And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, either read the book or wait until I write more about it.

Subversion repository

I just create a project at code.google.com. Right now there’s only a little Python module called gltoy which I intend to use for toying around with OpenGL. So – not much to see here right now.

Procedural worlds

My vision is a huge, realistic (within the given story setting) and highly detailed world. A world bigger than any team of designers could create in a reasonable lifetime. So instead of manually crafting the terrain, placing cities, houses and objects, you define rules and algorithms that create the world for you.

Or perhaps it is the other way round: I’m a hacker, not a designer. So the obvious way to create a fantastic world is to define such algorithms and rules and let the CPU do the dirty work.

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About the author

I’m located in Zürich, Switzerland and work as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) at Google. My job is about managing and administrating the stuff that is sitting behind Youtube and other Google properties that use some kind of video functionality. My job also involved writing some code, but that’s not the primary focus area.

Writing software has been the most entertaining occupation for me since I started dabbling with computers. Creating games was always high on the list, although there was always some other stuff on it as well, like math software, web content management and server administration systems. The list of software I actually published is very limited though.

I am not and never was a professional game developer. But I did stick my nose into that area and at some time even seriously considered getting a job in this industry.

I am not a hardcore gamer – but I must admit that we just recently bought a new computer for the sole purpose of playing recent games. I do enjoy playing games, mostly role playing games. So this site is about topics originating from this genre.

I do know what it takes to develop a serious software project. At my day job I have to deal with some really freaking huge systems – I can’t give you any numbers, but that’s for your own good, because they would simply blow your head away. And another significant part of that knowledge comes from trying and failing as well.

My time to pursue projects outside of my day job is very limited. The job is quite demanding (but fun) and I got family, so the opportunities for mindless hacking sessions are rather small.

I suck at blogging and my personal website is horribly out of data at the time of writing this.

Motivation

We all know the “perfect game.” We play a game and think “Wow, that’s cool, *but*…” If you are like me, then thousand of ideas pop up in your head – how you would do this better or that differently. Once the brain starts spinning, it produces step by step a blueprint of “the perfect game” – the ultimate experience (at least how far you’re able to envision it).

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