New and Surprising Ways to Be Mean

Christian Guckelsberger; Christoph Salge; Julian Togelius

doi:10.1109/CIG.2018.8490453

New and Surprising Ways to Be Mean

Christian Guckelsberger, Christoph Salge, Julian Togelius

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Abstract

Creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that can react robustly to unforeseen player behaviour or novel game content is difficult and time-consuming. This hinders the design of believable characters, and the inclusion of NPCs in games that rely heavily on procedural content generation. We have previously addressed this challenge by means of empowerment, a model of intrinsic motivation, and demonstrated how a coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM) policy can yield generic, companion-like behaviour. In this paper, we extend the CEM framework with a minimisation policy to give rise to adversarial behaviour. We conduct a qualitative, exploratory study in a dungeon-crawler game, demonstrating that CEM can exploit the affordances of different content facets in adaptive adversarial behaviour without modifications to the policy. Changes to the level design, underlying mechanics and our character's actions do not threaten our NPC's robustness, but yield new and surprising ways to be mean.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018
Publisher	IEEE Computer Society
ISBN (Electronic)	9781538643594
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2018.8490453
State	Published - Oct 11 2018
Event	14th IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018 - Maastricht, Netherlands Duration: Aug 14 2018 → Aug 17 2018

Publication series

Name	IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG
Volume	2018-August
ISSN (Print)	2325-4270
ISSN (Electronic)	2325-4289

Other

Other	14th IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018
Country/Territory	Netherlands
City	Maastricht
Period	8/14/18 → 8/17/18

Keywords

Adversaries
Coupled Empowerment Maximisation
Intrinsic Motivation
Non-Player Characters

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Artificial Intelligence
Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Human-Computer Interaction
Software

Access to Document

10.1109/CIG.2018.8490453

Cite this

New and Surprising Ways to Be Mean. / Guckelsberger, Christian; Salge, Christoph; Togelius, Julian.
Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018. IEEE Computer Society, 2018. 8490453 (IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG; Vol. 2018-August).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Guckelsberger, C, Salge, C & Togelius, J 2018, New and Surprising Ways to Be Mean. in Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018., 8490453, IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG, vol. 2018-August, IEEE Computer Society, 14th IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games, CIG 2018, Maastricht, Netherlands, 8/14/18. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2018.8490453

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abstract = "Creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that can react robustly to unforeseen player behaviour or novel game content is difficult and time-consuming. This hinders the design of believable characters, and the inclusion of NPCs in games that rely heavily on procedural content generation. We have previously addressed this challenge by means of empowerment, a model of intrinsic motivation, and demonstrated how a coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM) policy can yield generic, companion-like behaviour. In this paper, we extend the CEM framework with a minimisation policy to give rise to adversarial behaviour. We conduct a qualitative, exploratory study in a dungeon-crawler game, demonstrating that CEM can exploit the affordances of different content facets in adaptive adversarial behaviour without modifications to the policy. Changes to the level design, underlying mechanics and our character's actions do not threaten our NPC's robustness, but yield new and surprising ways to be mean.",

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New and Surprising Ways to Be Mean

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Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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