Crowdsourced player data could help mould characters imbued with AI, making them more realistic and fun to interact with

Bots are more fun (Image: Blizzard Entertainment)

MOST gamers prefer playing against their friends rather than the computer, but for how much longer? Intelligent bots could become the ultimate opponents in virtual worlds – or the best companions.

In role-playing and action games, the personalities of non-player characters are often scripted and predictable, even though the player has to interact with them frequently. Massachusetts-based start-up GiantOtter wants to take these characters to another level of realism, using data from crowdsourced human interactions.

The problem with current games is that any behaviour you see has to be imagined and then programmed in, says the company’s co-founder Jeff Orkin. He thinks crowdsourcing can provide a potentially limitless database of responses and behaviours for AI bots that will replace scripted characters.


Orkin is now collecting instances of player responses to situations in a series of online mini fantasy games the company has developed. The idea is to focus on group dynamics. What if the player puts on a disguise and an enemy suspects something? How does that information affect the characters’ behaviour as it spreads?

Gamers tackle these scenarios while talking to each other on the net, just as they would when playing other games. Speech recognition software transcribes their conversations for researchers to label with keywords, so that AI can use real human speech and behaviour in similar situations.

GiantOtter is also developing a separate series of mini online games to gather more complex data on human interaction, such as how people react to everyday situations as well as occasions when something unexpected happens. The first of these is The Restaurant Game HD, due to go live in November, when it will record the behaviour of thousands of players in a virtual restaurant.

Online games will gather data on how people react to everyday situations or the unexpected

Programmed characters are necessarily limited, says Orkin.”But once you open that up to the game-playing public, potentially millions of people, you have these characters who can surprise players and create a more lifelike experience,” he says.

The idea is that bots in games will behave in ways that are both more unpredictable and more natural. They could even have audible discussions between themselves, which the players could eavesdrop on. However the bots act, they will ensure that the game never unfolds the same way twice.

Julian Togelius at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, says embedding sophisticated examples of human behaviour in games could lead to far more engaging experiences. He and his colleagues are creating algorithms that can play complex strategy games, like the massively popular multiplayer game Starcraft. Such games have so many options that standard AI can barely cope, limiting how much fun you can have if competing against a bot. Togelius’s algorithms perform far better, but even the best ones so far are no match for expert human players.

AI in games has been pretty stagnant over the last decade, says Orkin. “No one has really thought of what else AI could be doing. I think looking at what humans would do when put in the same situations is the right way to expand that repertoire.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “You’ve got personality… for a bot”