Greetings from Paris Game AI Conference 2010

The title image is a bit of an insider joke to those who had the pleasure to experience the technical problems of my talk.

I spent last week in Paris. Three of those days I spent with fellow game AI devs at Paris Game AI Conference. It is a rare situation to meet so many talented and enthusiastic people. I also had talk at the conference. I will post more about that soon, along with the demo and the slides. I think I will write more detailed posts on the topic too.

Bjoern has good coverage of the talks on other blogs and sites, I'm just going to give you few observations.

Empathy and AI

I had the feeling that this year there were more veteran devs in there–Bruce Bloomberg, Ken Perlin, Noah Falstein, just to name few. My big take away from them was to design with user experience in mind and engineer the simplest possible solution to achieve that.

That is, rather than asking if you should use behavior tree or finite state machine, you should ask what is that you want the user the experience and then work it out the easiest solution from there. It is not easy, though. I think such problem solving skill comes with experience. You sort of need to have a feeling of the potential solutions and their strengths. I think Ken's advice is really good rule of thumb, create the simples possible solution first and iterate from there.

You get a good head start by thinking the problem from the users point of view. For example, what kind of feedback is needed to understand the AI, or what kind of interactions you want to use to have with your AI?

Mikael Hedberg had interesting talk how that thinking evolved in the case Battlefield Bad Company. For example they measured that an average screen time of an AI is about 5 seconds. If the death of an AI opponent takes approx. 2 seconds, it is worth putting quite a bit of effort to get that part right.

Good death and hit reactions is the key to make the AI opponent to feel good interactive toy. When working on shooters, just make that awesome first. And while the designers are having good time killing all the foes, add some magic to make them fight back better.

Bruce Bloomberg's talk was also great example of this mindset. I don't think I can ever be so honest about how to simplify the content creation process and the technology based on how the player perceives things as they have been.

Few months back, there was a video of a magician called Jamy Ian Swiss circulating the nets. He used the word empathy to describe this property of user experience driven design. The video is worth watching.

Gameplay vs. AI

Another really welcome development I saw was how people categorize AI programming. In past there usually has bee really clear cut between what belongs to AI and what belongs to gameplay. It seems that a lot of people, from designers to programmers, consider game AI to be a broad concept.

And that is true! In current games the concepts from AI are being applied very broadly across all the gameplay related things from audio to animation. I think this is very good change. The biggest advantage is that the solutions that were before only "available" to AI programmers can now be used to solve other problems too. Sometimes the barriers are in our minds.

It was also interesting to note that this year most of the people were using really simple solutions to their problems. It may have been also the result of Alex's great choice of talks. Most people were using (hierarchical) finite state machines instead of more complex solutions. The reason could be that many talks were biased towards game characters, but it also resonates with the aim to find as simple as possible solutions.


All in all, it was awesome conference, can't wait to get there next year! Big thanks to Alex and Petra for all the arrangements. I'm going to enjoy the rest of my vacation and work hard next week to put the demo and code online.