Beautiful Review of Dishonored

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/178604/Why_people_are_playing_Dishonored.php

This review is verging on over-literary but manages to avoid being sickening.  Its just a beautifully lyrical celebration of something that the reviewer seems to enjoy deeply.

Very nice writing.

Algorithmic Colour Article..

http://devmag.org.za/2012/07/29/how-to-choose-colours-procedurally-algorithms/

This is a really well developed article on selecting colour algorithmically.  Very useful for GUI and game design applications as well as explaining some of the failures. 

The variable that is always a problem in these kinds of systems is the final output and the eyeballs that receive it.  The randomness of colour output on all the monitors around here alwasy frustrates me.  No two are the same (Except perhaps the Dell Ultrasharps.) Everything else is just... random.  bad backlights, crappy ghosting, motion artifacts, dust, flakey illumination, fingerprints.... endless pain when trying to acheive "sameness" between research stations.

Storytelling tips from Pixar ex

http://storyshots.tumblr.com/post/25032057278/22-storybasics-ive-picked-up-in-my-time-at-pixar

These are some interesting ideas for writers of narrative.  Some of which are applicable for story generation systems.

Go Algorithms

http://needforair.com/blog/2012/04/18/game-of-go/

Interesting.

Decay Rate of Learned Skills

http://www.seriousplayconference.com/blog/learning-decays/

This is an interesting piece of research that illustrates something I have always wondered about.  How long do skills last once I "learn" them? 

If this is a repeatable measure or even close ( as I suspect it is for most "normal" skills) then it suggests that its only material you have learned or practiced in the past month and a half that define what you are "good at".  All your other skills have decayed or are decaying to some level of uselessness.

So the question becomes, how many skills can you practice and "keep sharp" in a rolling six week period?  Is this period fixed for everyone? Fixed for an individual? Are there ways to "fit more in" so they can be practised more quickly? (Simulation and training packs for individuals?)

Keep in mind that the figure of six weeks includes decay time; after 8 weeks the benefit of the learning was completely gone.

Makes you wonder about the value of formal education. 

Game Design Patterns

http://gdp2.tii.se/index.php/Main_Page

There is a massive pile of stuff in this wiki.  Fossic around and see what turns up.

(bad)Magical game scripting

I have been picking through the quest scripting interface for oblivion and honestly I'm shocked that it works at all.  I get that it's implemented as a fun little dynamic language that anyone can pick up and use... but its also a giant stick to beat yourself with.  Horrible unstructured spagetti code sprayed with pretend objects, magic numbers, state fragments and every other crappy artifact of bad programming you can imagine.  There is only nominal encapsulation, no compile time checking... magic numbers are the order of the day... basically all the bad things that every paid programming tool set has been trying to help prevent for the past 50 years...

It's frustrating that each game platform re-invents the wheel with their scripting languages and re-creates the same set of bugs and flaws. 

That said, I sympathise with the system designers who are tying to balance accessibility and flexibility with function and some measure of protection for their runtime.

If only level designers were highly skilled programmers... lol.

This train of thought leads down the slipper slope of ... "If only..."... and "We could make it better if...".  However, everything has a price.  Raise the feautures and we raise the complexity for the users.  Feature creep in the scripting languages will only increase the debbuging costs and the chance of exploits. 

Look at matlab, labview, eprime, maxscript, (those are just the ones I have used in the past week) etc etc etc... every one of them started with the idea that they could make a simple runtime with a scripting interface and a few tools that would allow novice users to build ... stuff. 

They all have varying learning curves... varying degrees of depth, various mechanisms to help with bug management and usually user scripts with bug counts up the whazoo. (If the ones I have seen are anything to go by...)

I think the problem has been well described in many other places, the users are ignorant, the tools are unfriendly and the language is full of traps.  (Oh and the runtime is probably buggy as a termite nest.)

So... we have a problem... whats the solution? Better educated users? Tools that check and identify common classes of errors (static script analysis anyone?) and a less fragile language.  All the things every language community has been arguing about for years.... Nice to know I'm not cutting any new ground today...

Think laterally... make a graphical programming environment... drag and drop... boilerplate script... templates.. generics... maybe let the users do their own memory allocation... add raw pointers to the scripting language ...lol.  ...hmmmm no.  Is this a hopeless... fluffly problem that has too many dimensions?  No.

The thing is that the scripting languages are not trying to solve low level programming problems.  Usually they're pushing around high level constructs with very clearly defined abstractions.  The game world is very rigidly defined and the need for magic numbers is pretty limited.  Incrementing and decrementing a skill number can be done through a function call to increment() or decrement() rather than passing a raw int to a setter method.  This forces the script writer to play by some clearly defined rules that the interface designer has laid down and write their script at a level of abstraction and in terms of the "game" world... not at the level of raw numbers. 

A scripting language for a defined interface should not support lower level abstractions than are defined in the interface. 

This also means that patching the runtime does not break scripts.  As long as the abstractions in the interface do not change... everyone is fairly happy.  You can even write tests in the scripting language.


If a scripter wants to do something fancy.... let them write it up in a doc, generalise some cases and request a change to the interface... but for Oblivions sake, don't hand the tools and the responsibility to the scripters... its not their job to make the runtime safe.

Doomed Game AI Research

The problem with doing research on Game AI is that its all secret sauce.  The AI systems are still considered as a competative advantage so "officially" the source is protected.  The other reality is that they are a "work in progress"... so like most software, they are undocumented and constantly evolving...

This makes studying them at best observational research and at worst like trying to dent water.

Id are about the only company releasing their old game source... although without the assets, so it should be possible to reverse their AI system.  This results in a 10yr old system that has been cloned by eveyone... kind of like game development DNA. And they used scripted AI anyway... so nothing to see there.

The next source is articles and books written by developers and designers.  These are often short, conceptual and neat.  The describe intention and mechanism... and we assume they reveal the "secret sauce"... but in reality the implemtations are going to have their own kinks and twists which don't make it into the article.  Probably not significant but sitll there's a gap between reality and the description which may contain something interesting.

The other side of this is that no matter what the designers intended, emergent systems are by their very nature, a bit unpredictable.  So after all that... observation and experimental testing may be the only way to really document them.  Having the source would make it a lot faster....

But to make the whole observation problem slightly managable we just need more eyeballs... lucky someone invented internet forums to bitch about bad AI... whooot.

E.g Artificial Stupidity at tvtropes. This is a great collection of anecdotes about flawed AI.

Reading this suggests that the "game" is to figure out weaknesses in the enemy strategy... which, when you think about it is the point of any game, even those against a human player.  So are these AI really "flawed" or are they imperfect enough to be satisfying? Do players want an unbeatable opponent? I would think not.  So that only leaves "flawed" opponents... in other words "human", limited, imperfect.... this gets to the question of the type of flaw... will it be a "human" flaw? A Character "flaw"?  So sort of tactical flaw based on not understanding the resources/economy/vehicles/environment?

Do we want the AI to display "human" flaws when they are simulating "things" that are not human?   (How much role-playing do we want encoded in the AI?)

All this gets back to presenting a challenge to a player... which leads to the conclusion that no matter what the AI "should" be doing as far as actually manipulating game elements, it needs to be able to adapt to the players capacity in some fashion.  I shall state it thusly...

Rule 1 of Game AI - Play the player not the game. 

(Reminds me of a line from the movie "Searching for Bobby Fisher")  The player defines the challenge, thus the AI needs to know the player. This gets me back to my on-going rant about modelling the player as the basis of a game AI system.

It's obvious that the vast majority of game developers (99%+ would be my conservative estimate) spend no resources on modelling the player, they simply try to react to the current state of the players avatar or their units and leave it at that.  Pour on a couple of reactive heuristics and some tuning constants and cross their fingers. Or simply have a "Novice", "Middle"and "Hard" settings.  This presents a simple target for the game tuners to work with but also allows the player to exercise some choice about the type of game they want to play "Now".  Sometimes, I just want to blat around in a game without being "Challenged". So I think its important to allow the player to choose their difficulty level in some fashion.  

Reading more of the comments leads to the conclusion that the second rule must be...


Rule 2 of Game AI - Play all the game elements. 

By this I mean that the AI should have heuristics governing all the play elements. In the case where there are dozens or hundreds of different "bits" in the game, the developers have just made a stick to beat themselves with.  Permutation is the enemy.. until they figure out a way to build an AI to write the rule sets for them... Duh!  Computers are there to do the repetative work...

Obviously this starts to bite when the AI is computationally limited and the rulesets exceed the resources allocated.  But even in those situations it should be a case of creating an AI that can decide what to spend that limited CPU resource on... one ruleset to rule them all... lol.

It's easy to see how developers dig themselves into these holes by trying to hand tune games with insane numbers of relationships between game elements. 

Finally, we get to....

Rule 3 of Game AI - Match your players expectations.   

The common thread though the forums is that players expectations are being violated.  It's not that the AI is smarter or dumber or creates wildly un-desirable behaviour (although that's often the end result) but that player "Notice" when the AI does something they think is uncharacteristic.  If they are expecting a smart AI and it acts stupid... tada... forums catch fire.   

So, the big issue is to manage the players expectations.  Tell them before, during and after what they should expect.  Currently, the situation is more that players learn by observation (nothing bad about that) except their learning starts long before they get to most games.  If the game is a strategy game, they have probably seen a couple of movies or read a book or two that have shaped their expectations.  These feed into their expectations of the game behaviour... which is quite reasonable as the game is drawing on those genre's for art and marketing... so its reasonable for the player to carry their expectations into the game.

Am I suggesting that developers should not be ambitious and create games using genre material that the AI is not yet capable of simulating?  That seems a bit limiting... but it would be nice to see the time and energy put into the AI and simulation that matched the quality of the art work, for instance.

I think there is a sense of acheivement when a player figures out (or reads on a forum) an exploitable flaw in a games AI.  Spending the time learning about your enemy, testing them and finally beating them is the essence of competition.  Because of the re-playability of games, they turn into a puzzle that can be beaten if you are persisent. In this case having flaws in the AI behaviour is kind of essential. 

When the AI is not simulating an "Enemy" to be beaten but is trying to generate background behaviour, showing flaws is just wrong. The suspension of disbelief  that the player needs to buy into for the narrative to work is essential and fragile.  Break this and the game is fundamentally broken. The great thing is that players are able to selectivly ignore instances and forgive mistakes and regain their flow given enough other material to continue playing. But multiple, repeated or massive violations drag the game down to a point where it becomes a sham and the player feels foolish for "playing along" with it and abandons it.  Because this kind of simulated life buys into some fairly complex expectations that the players will be carrying into the game, its a particularly hard problem to get right.  


Rule 4 of Game AI - Life is infinitly complex, the players perception is not. 

Resource limits are real in most games so procedural generation is the only viable mechanism for behaviour and art assets when you want to produce complexity. But not all games want to end up looking like "Spore".  So there needs to be some more tools in the toolbox.

Scenario Templating, Procedural generation, Scripts, Rulesets, Heuristics, Skeletal animation + Skins, motion libraries, behaviour libraries, better reaction heuristics, player modelling, AI systems to generate AI systems,  cheating, suggestion, borrowing from the players experience.

Good narrative works by allowing the reader to fill in many of the blanks themselves and just sketches the background.  I feel that most games are able to do this convincingly enough but the question is how to identify and fix the weak points.

More thinking to do.

So whats the linear solution to the exponential problem?

Have the AI do what people do, use feedback... predict the result of their activity, do the behaviour and then evaluate that result, modify their ruleset, rinse, repeat... This simple feedback loop should prevent a lot of the repetative stupidity that I see in the forum posts.  It would also help with game tuning.  Building evaluation critieria is much easier than having a blind ruleset that is context insensitive.

There are some more interesting examples here http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpitefulAI

Imitation is the most poorly thought out form of flattery....

http://mattgemmell.com/2011/11/27/copycats/

Great article analysing the effects of integrating someone else's design decisions in your product.  Very insightful.

This is especially insightful for the thread that has been running through my head for the past week about iterative improvement on existing game designs.  Similar problem and the same flaws.  Making anything me-to is just dooming yourself to failure on many fronts.

Its interesting to look at the media space after reading this article, with the number of me-to's, franchies and tie-in products... even the same product done across multiple platforms has elements of this kind of failure built in.

The argument that goes... "which is better the book or the film?" is often decided simply by which one the speaker saw first.  The other is always a copy.  It's interesting with the case where there is a movie derived from a book; and you see the movie first knowing that there is a book with a different treatment... its always hard to not see the compromises in the movie that have been made to fit the media and genre conventions.

There is much to think about....

Radiant AI reviews

Started collecting some commentary on the Radiant AI engine.

http://bitmob.com/articles/dimming-the-radiant-ai-in-oblivion

There are some interesting comments following the article.
This article talks specifically about the choice that the developers of Oblivion made about the AI.  It makes some good points about the problems with emergent systems vs the needs and conventions of a narrative game.  Its interesting to see that when the AI system generated unexpected results, the designers chose the conservative solution of going back to simple scripts rather than trying to fix the emergent system ( which would have been much more fun) 

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/asshole-physics-meet.php

This article, although fairly low on results illustrates an interesting point about the AI in games, namely how it can be tested or re-purposed for entertainment.  I think, while this is clearly not in the spirit of the game, it does suggest a functional way of testing emergent AI systems. Act like an Asshole and see if the NPC's treat you like one.  In the case of the version of the AI that shipped with Oblivion... clearly they did not.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8900168580155619696&q=oblivion+chapter&pl=true

This is the pre-release demo video for Oblivion showing some of the possibilities of the AI system which did not all make it to release in Oblivion but seem to have been polished for Skyrim.

http://videosift.com/video/Oblivions-Radiant-AI-not-as-great-as-they-said-it-would-be

Another video illustrating how unresponsive the AI can be to events in the immediate environment.


http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=105339&page=1

This is a four page forum thread about various aspects of the Oblivion AI wins and losses. Some interesting points. 

http://elderscrolls.filefront.com/file/NPC_with_jobs;73212
One of the AI Mod's for Oblivion.   Seems to be a rebuild of some of the generic NPC stereotypes along with a couple of other odds and ends.  Includes source. Very interesting.


http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/mqw0h/the_radiant_ai_really_wowwed_me_tonight/

Here are some fun stories from Skyrim about AI interactions. 

Gamey taste....

What sort of game do I feel like playing at the moment? Its after midnight, I'm awake but only just and want entertainment, not a movie or tv... just something serene and quiet.  No drama.

Well after looking at the options, its nothing fast, deep or pointless.  I feel like doing something but not competing.  Just wandering around in some virtual world and checking things out. But there is nothing low intensity.  If I wander around in Oblivion or Stalker, I will just run into something that wants to eat me, maim me or otherwise spoil a pleasant evenings virtual stroll.

I have the urge to use a quality engine like Skyrim and build a better world.  I appreciate the urge to go adventuring and the role that combat plays in so many of those style of games, but we have reached a point where we are not limited to that kind of game.  Well for all intent the technical limits are not as heavy, but the fiscal limits are probably still there.  I doubt many publishers would drop five figures on my urge to build a world that didnt include lots of hack and slash.

I just want a beautiful world that I can wander into at will.... but isn't that what most of the fantasy fiction writers have been doing since year dot?

Since I'm not in the mood to actually do something specific, any sort of narrative structure would be just irritating. In my current state, I just want to ghost around.  Not really engage, just fill my eyes with gorgeous visuals and hang out somewhere that calms my mind after a busy day.  Is this even a game? Sounds like a photo gallery with a couple of extra dimensions.

Probably would not sell well.

Hobo signs

http://www.worldpath.net/~minstrel/hobosign.htm

Good ideas for a game here.

phd in game AI research

PhD opportunities


http://www.nicta.com.au/research/machine_learning/machine_learning_phd_opportunities


http://www.daad.de/deutschland/forschung/german-research-careers/14305.en.html?projektid=54473531&fachgebiet=0&finanzierung=0&stadt=&institution=&sprache=&personenkreis=&promotionsart=


http://www.jason.edu.au/scholarship/5365


http://www.statsci.org/jobs/2011a/110325c.html


http://topstudylinks.com/PhD-Positions-in-Computer-Vision-Machine-Learning-Freiburg,-Germany-2012-2013-s301.aspx


http://www.getscholarship.net/


http://www.utas.edu.au/research/graduate-research/elite/human-interface-technology-laboratory-hitlab-australia


 http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~adrian/

http://www.scholarships-links.com/viewdetail/3011/PhD-Candidates-Gaming-and-HCI-in-cars.html


http://scholarshipdb.com/


http://computervisioncentral.com/jobs/full

http://www.youngbrigades.com/postdoctoral-fellowships/france-two-postdoctoral-positions-in-computer-science-machine-learning.html


People and groups

http://gameai.itu.dk/index.php/About

http://www.unimaas.nl/games/

http://www.ieee-cig.org/

http://aigamedev.com/

http://home.cc.gatech.edu/ccl/2

http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/

 http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/

http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~games/

http://www.rit.edu/gccis/gameeducationjournal/


http://www.computing.dcu.ie/~bgorman/

http://cognitivecomputing.wordpress.com/ccl-team/

http://www.nicta.com.au/about


http://www.eecs.umich.edu/ai/faculty.html

http://www-kd.iai.uni-bonn.de/people.php?kristian.kersting


http://www2.cs.uregina.ca/~herbertj/cv.html

http://gambit.mit.edu/credits/

http://www.csml.ucl.ac.uk/courses/msc_ml/

http://goertzel.org/Goertzel_resume.pdf

http://140.118.155.153/~pao/

http://gameai.itu.dk/psm/index.php?title=Members


http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~kulikows/


Australian Groups and People

http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/research/isg/people.html

http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~dkamen/research.htm

http://au.linkedin.com/in/drrobertlayton

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Mellon_School_of_Computer_Science

http://www.une.edu.au/study/computer-science/

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/chess.html

http://uob-community.ballarat.edu.au/~pvamplew/index.html

http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~manolya/cv-mk.html

http://ssll.cecs.anu.edu.au/speakers/mlss

http://chai.it.usyd.edu.au/Seminars/2011


http://strategicgames.com.au/index.php?p=1_14

http://www.flinders.edu.au/people/tom.anderson

http://seit.unsw.adfa.edu.au/staff/sites/kshafi/

http://www.uow.edu.au/~koren/

http://goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au/~xiaodong/aciss09/tutorials.html

http://charybdis.mit.csu.edu.au/crics/members.php


http://www.ict.csiro.au/staff/shiping.chen/

http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~visual/kaixu/


http://www.handbook.uts.edu.au/it/area/pg.html

http://cs.anu.edu.au/research/groups/ai

http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/liuw/index.html


Conferences

http://gameaiconf.com/

http://geneura.ugr.es/cig2012/

http://gcap.com.au/

http://summit2011.singinst.org.au/bios/ben-goertzel/


http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/2011/aaai11tutorials.php


Journals

http://ilk.uvt.nl/icga/journal/

http://www.gdmag.com/homepage.htm

http://gamestudiesbook.net/category/journals/

http://convergence.beds.ac.uk/

http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/

http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/

http://www.gamejournal.org/

http://eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/

http://gamestudies.org/1102

http://gac.sagepub.com/




Commercial AI groups

http://www.spirops.com/

http://www.ekione.com/

http://www.pathengine.com/

http://www.havok.com/

http://opencog.org/


http://gdaa.com.au/

http://kioloa08.mlss.cc/files/hutter2.pdf

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/people.html


Mailing Lists

http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.machine-learning


Interesting articles that turned up in the search

http://aigamedev.com/open/interview/racing-games-computational-intelligence/

http://aigamedev.com/open/article/preview-biologically-inspired-ai/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/ijcaiigames/

http://www.gametheory.net/lectures/level.pl

http://doras.dcu.ie/view/subjects/CO.html

http://www.igi-global.com/book/machine-learning-human-motion-analysis/701

http://caia.swin.edu.au/cv/garmitage/publist.html

http://www.dtic.ua.es/~jgarcia/IJCNN2012/organizers.html

http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/mix4c/am_i_planning_it_right_for_a_phd_in_ml/

http://sml.nicta.com.au/isml08/fsml.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments

Skyrim Analysis

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/20/review-skyrim/

This is an interesting analysis of the UI and play models in Skyrim. Its interesting to note how reviews are generally no longer focusing on graphics and performance. I feel like we are past that point (as long as you can throw enough CPU/GPU horse power at the game) My point is that playability and User Experience are now the weak points.

From the review above, the cons are:

• Combat isn’t very visceral, and victories and losses feel unearned
• Menus and interface are terrible
• While the world is wide open, most quests and dungeons are very linear
• Bugs abound, especially with physics

These issues are the next things to be addressed in games research.  The fact that everyone has been banging on about them for the past two decades shows just how hard they are to get right.   Especially in the context of producing a AAA title across a couple of platforms with different User experiences and interface models.


Combat isn't very visceral
Combat as a visceral experience... interesting idea from the reviewer.  While I agree that its the objective of this kind of game, to make any interaction really immersive is going to take something more than a mouse(insert UI device here) and a single dimension screen to make me feel immersed.  The monitor wall's and head mounted goggles are a big step to remove the need to manually track your head around in an environment, but there is still a long way to go before everyone has access to something like that.  Kinect is a step in the right direction but its too loose at the moment to really work well.  I think it would be much improved with some additional channels of resolution and maybe a few precision channels of data like a head axis positioning system,(crown with some position knobs) precision line of sight and precision location and orientation for hands (maybe some simple cuffs with 3D position knobs) and let the rest of the Kinect data stream fill in the gaps.

The second part of combat being visceral is feedback. Haptic controls have not really evolved much and are still trying hard to solve the most basic problems.  This is more about technology and materials than about intent.  The strategies are still the same.  Immerse the player in some system that can simulate feedback with reasonable resolution.  For a CRPG game this could be as diverse as holding an object, taking blows, falling or flying, jumping, landing, being swept down a river or just walking on a soft surface.  The ability to simulate these kinds of environments safely is not here.  Everyone will want one when they are availible from your local gadget seller... but they are just not here. So wishing combat was more visceral is important to keep the bar high... but its just not feasible to go beyond the limitations of the UI devices we currently have.


Victories and Losses feel unearned
This is an interesting problem that is much more complex than simply a limited UI.  There are real issues with perception and feedback at work here.  To complicate it, individual players will have quite different perceptions and desires in this particular space.

Lets break it down a little.

• How hard should a player work for an objective? ( be it a victory or some other objective)
• How balanced should this sub-section be of the overall section of narrative or mission? 
• What are the highs and lows of the variable reward model currently in play? 
• How do you keep something fresh, if the scenario itself is repetitive ( attacked by wolf?)

This is as much about player perceptions.  I have written about this particular group of problems and proposed some solutions before but honestly they are just guesses until I have the resources to get paid and solve these kinds of problems.  The strategy that I propose is that both the narrative engine and the perception engine are abstracted and deal with the narrative and player models explicitly as a construct that the game engine manipulates.  (Not that the game manipulates the player, just that the players state by explicitly measured and modeled continuously so the game engine has some concept of player state and can then make decisions based on that understanding.)
The key point is the abstraction of the narrative structure and its relationship with the player state at any point in time. The information in these two models can then be instantiated via the concrete game objects, characters and scenarios, rather than, as currently happens, each of these elements acts as either discreet and independant agents or as a chain of artificially scripted agents who hopefully fit all players equally (badly).
Again, this all comes back to the "commonality" of experience, which is based on a basic desire for repeatability and predictability.  This is essential for debugging... but only until the game engines evolve and abstract all this functionality out into a higher level construct.

So how does all this rambling address the "victories feel unearned" issue?  Well, if the player model was reasonably well developed and informed via some subtle evaluation of the players behavior, the game engine should be able to tune the "encounter" appropriately to provide the player with a challenge of sufficient uniqueness and magnitude to keep the player engaged.  This information is then combined with the current narrative model, to determine if this "encounter" should be big or small depending on the stage in the current narrative arc that the player is within.

This kind of model points the way forward for managing the engagement and satisfaction of players in the game.  Which then points the way forward for using these kinds of  immersive environments for specific training purposes.  


Weak AI
The reviewer took time to critique the same-ness of the AI used in the game, which I feel ties into this point.  For a game of this scope to have weak AI is pretty embarrassing.  I would suggest that after the epic re-write of their engine, the AI subsection is just not as polished yet.  This is a fairly solved problem, so it does raise the question of priorities in the development process.  My guess would be that "good enough" AI was acceptable by the majority of the playtester and they stopped putting resources into that section.  After all, development is a resource constrained activity.

Hopefully the mod community will be able to patch this particular problem or expose the API enough to let others have a run at building better AI for the game.

Menus and Interface are Terrible
There are some novel interface metaphors in Skyrim ( such as the star constellations for the progression tree) which add a very nice immersive touch.  These are more information visualization elements, rather than functional information navigation tools.

The fact that the interfaces have been tuned for navigation by a controller with limited buttons is both a blessing and a curse.  Having a slew of hotkeys availible on a PC keyboard is useful but can present a steep learning curve for novice players, this affects the pace that the game can be played between novice and expert players and has detrimental effects for players who want to play in a "pickup" style.  ( It could also be argued that these kinds of games are probably not intended for a "pickup" audience... they are almost study Sims that need a fair bit of experience before you can get into them.) 

Anyway, by keeping the Interface approachable, it forces the designers to reign in the control explosion that can happen and keeps the cognitive load manageable.  On the other hand, it puts a ceiling on the way expert players can drive the interface.  This is the sort of thing the mod community is probably better at solving than the initial development team; as long as the API's are open enough to allow the modders to rebuild the UI.


Linear Quests and Dungeon
This is where my interest lies.  Again, as I stated above, I believe this is strongly tied to the problem of "commonality" of experience.  (Again, both for debugging and for comparison between players)
The reason that the quests and dungeons are linear is that its simply to expensive to hand tune quests and dungeons with multiple permutations of possible paths.  This is simply a manpower issue that is not solvable by current development teams.  THIS PROBLEM CANNOT BE FIXED WITH CURRENT TOOLS.

The only solution is to make the computer do the heavy lifting (which is what we keep them around for), but for this to happen, we need an abstract way to describe the narrative which the computer can then manage and for this to work, we need an abstract model of the player as a component in the narrative.  See above rant for more details. 

Once we have a functional model for narratives ( .. oh wait there's a bunch already...) that are easy to implement and a control engine that can handle it under resource competition with the graphics and animation engines ( resource budgets again) it should be fairly straight forward to script.  The problem is that "commonality" of experience may evaporate.  This has been happening already so it's probably not going to be the radical shock that I suggest, but it will still be a revolutionary change that will overturn a couple of the conventions that exist in the game world.  How do we know we are playing the same game if it evolves every time we play it?  My experience will be totally different to yours... theoretically down to really fundamental levels that currently we take for granted as completely immutable truths in the environment. Well immutable until the modders take a hack at it anyway. But even mods are fairly static. I am talking about a system that can dynamically mix and match the narrative and experience to the player at many levels.  Unless the player is exactly the same each time, every replay, even by the same player should be distinct.

I still expect some mechanism to emerge that will allow side by side comparisons of player experiences, perhaps the idea of "set" quests that do not dynamically adapt or some sort of set "level" to play at that fixes the player model so the game can be tested and debugged as well as allow "walkthroughs" and other advice services to still have a frame of reference. But beyond these I expect a fully dynamic play experience that focuses on the player and adapts the world to provide the maximum play experience possible using all the narrative trickery possible.

Bugs in the physics 
Ok, the bugs in the physics engine is just embarrassing, but this is kind of accepted for a game of this magnitude and will probably get tuned out in the first round of patches.

The same problems are still around that have not been solved from the first CRPG's.  The thing to keep in mind is that unlike FPS games, CRPG games are usually solo experiences, online MMPRPG's have a different dynamic and will never be the same type of player centric experience.  

Here's a link to the skyrim site for more info and pretty pics
http://www.elderscrolls.com/skyrim

Here's a link to the skyrim modding community (I'm sure there are more sites growing as I type...)
http://www.skyrimnexus.com/index.php

Basic Computer Games

http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/index.php


Old skool....

Microsoft TellMe UI

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/Features/2011/aug11/08-01KinectTellme.mspx

This is an interesting article on the voice interface for the Xbox... which I see more and more in my future.

Reading Quake 2 Source for Pleasure

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake2/index.php

Time on your hands huh?  I would really like to be able to do this...

Skills from Video Games

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-real-skills-video-games-have-secretly-been-teaching-us/

This is articulate and funny. 

Challenge based skills drill

I have been playing some "Tux of math command" for amusement. The obvious application of this kind of game model is any small atomic knowledge elements that can be simply tested

Basic math operations, times tables etc have been covered well by 'Tux of Math Command". TuxTyping applies the same idea to typing games. I'm not as happy with it because it has a linear increase in speed.

Spelling, missing letter, missing word, extra letter, rotate the letters, etc.

Geometry, shapes etc get a little too close to tetris.

Anyway, the point is that this model could be applied to anything that needs drilling.  It could be applied to facts that a student wants to study.

The format modification I would add is to keep track of the RT's for the various stimuli in the game and repeat the elements with the highest RT's more often. The point being that the items that are harder get more repetition.

This is a simple feedback system that would need upper and lower thresholds for sanity checking.

The other response properties that could be tracked are accuracy, errors of commission, errors of ommision etc.  This kind of thing could then be used to inform the choice of the speed, duration and amount of pressure generated by the number of stimuli elements on screen at the same time.

The other addition would be setting some kind of threshold of achievement. This could be used to add an additional reinforcement.

So the reinforcement happens by repetition and success, which gets you to a degree of mastery, which you can then use to manipulate the elements in some way that forms a meta game.  Then by improving the mastery, the side effect is that the skill being drilled is no longer the focus but the mechanism underpinning the mastery and the higher level manipulation.

Example.

Simple spelling/typing task.  Type the word displayed on screen. The basic skill is to type the word correctly. The mastery comes from typing it more and more quickly under pressure ( in TuxTyping) while this is a fairly simple mechanism, it has little complexity to push the mastery beyond any particular level.  Instead think of a ladder. As the word moves down screen, it moves down the ladder and by typing and completing the word at the right time, the word is scored at the value for the particular ladder section that its over.  The values move in a predictable pattern on the ladder which allows more complexity in the mastery. 

By focusing on degrees of mastery rather than degrees of the basic function of the skill, the basic skill gets re-inforced in a different way. The question is how effective this is.

So start with a basic skill and add some executive function on top of the basic skill.

Dialog Game Mechanics

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8898-L-A-Noire-Review

Just read a review of LA Noir and the same problem has again shown up.  How to run character-player dialog that can follow the narrative while being convincing and functional. This problem has been around since CRPG's were first cracked out of the shrink wrap.

You want to talk to a character about something... so the current state of the art is a canned dialog tree or some sort of horrible natural language parser.  Both of which suck for very real and insurmountable reasons.

The canned dialog tree is incredibly restrictive and breaks the players immersion immediately because its never a good fit for what they actually want to say/ask/scream.  The natural language parser systems I have used always turn into a game of twenty questions just to find something the character will respond to.  Hardly a "conversation"; in reality a kind of torture that I just could not find entertainment in.  

My solution would be the same as that used for the light gem in Thief-the dark project. (Being too cryptic am I? You should read my honors thesis.) Its simply an abstract representation of otherwise impossible to aquire game knowledge.  The player gets a narrative artifice that, once they suspend disbelief, allows them access to information that cannot otherwise be communicated from the third person POV.  It also provides a way to project the knowledge back to the players space.  So in essence it actually engages the player even more.  There is a great deal to learn from this simple interface design exercise.

The question about dialog is... does is have to be concrete language passing between the player and their avatar and from the Avatar to the Character.  The answer is no and yes.So how would I design an immersive dialog system suitable for a free flowing game vs one with a strong narrative? 

Firstly a free-flowing game does not have the requirements for structured, topical dialog that a narrative game has... but the point is still valid.  I feel that I have a solution for both situations.  In general though the free flowing games simply has less objective to a dialog situation so there are less ways to evaluate success or failure.  (Makes it easier to be right.)  CRPG's that allow the player to wander around and talk to anyone (Morrowind et al) turn dialog into more of a random treasure hunt. If you are on a mission then the same rules apply as in a strongly narrative game.
A strong narrative game usually has structure and intent in a dialog.  Its not that dialog tree's didn't contain information, its just that the mechanic of picking a dialog option from a list is horribly crude.

Seems like an easy problem to solve. But that's me.  Now the question is to turn it into a PhD or go commercial with it?  Decisions decisions