Writing Computer Games
Things have certainly changed since I was involved in the computer games industry (yes, really, I am credited as being the producer of one successful release). Twenty years ago it was all about how much graphics could we fit into the computer of the time: now it seems to be about psychology as well. Here’s a fascinating little post (for an admittedly odd meaning of “fascinating”) about what’s being worked on for the next generation of games.
What the developers are looking for is authenticity, believability, in the actions of the characters. Currently, much of this is done using live actors and video capture: no one has quite built engines which will react to the actions of other characters believably just yet.
Now where this touches on our concerns here is that what the developers actually want is to build software that will have empathy: if one character frowns, or yawns, then the other characters in the game should react appropriately. In effect, they want to teach the computer models empathy, almost for them to pass an empathic (as opposed to intelligence) Turing Test.
And yes, in modelling human behaviour so as to be able to describe it in code, they are using the basic theories of Simon Baron Cohen, he of our EQSQ personality tests. I was most taken with this piece of advice:
Give your characters a simple model of the emotional status of others to make them seem less autistic when making decisions.
That’s really a rather good description of both empathy and autism there, isn’t it? The ability to divine the emotional status of others is generally agreed to be what autists lack and the ability to both recognise and react properly to them is empathy.
But it’s amazing how these things go, isn’t it? Research orginally intended to discover the underlying causes (and thus possible treatments for) of autism is leading to more realistic computer games.
December 27th, 2007 at 11:36 am
Are you speaking specifically of computer games and not of video games? Given that many video games ask its players to blow things up and shoot people down, it’s strange to think of empathy attached. I thought the justification on behalf of those who create and those who play such games was that it was an ‘unreality.’ Whether being asked to empathize with your own character (who just mowed one down) or with the other character (who was just mowed down), this is odd. Or perhaps this is just what we need to do! What if every manufacturer of any game that involved killing people had to include actions in the game that forced the player to deal with the consequences of the behavior: grieving family members, arrest, court, jail, etc.?
Like Clockwork Orange in a video game.
December 31st, 2007 at 10:08 pm
It depends upon the exact game. First person shooters (or Grand Theft Auto and the like) don’t require much empathy, that is true. But just as games like Sim City, Civilisation and so on require a sound understanding of economics (to program them, if not to play them), so some of the games require that characters interact with each other in a believable, human manner. And that means their being able to react in a believable manner to actions and statements of others.
And thus the use of such rules to help them do so: for currently those characters are indeed very like the autistic, in that they don’t have that empathic feeling for the others around them.