I was walking through the center of Bolton this morning thinking about a video I’d seen of some interruptible behaviours from a paper at AIIDE. One thing I have seen a lot of while working at the University is the type of social greetings that different cultures use when meeting each other. One thing that struck me when comparing the video (it was a movie of Neverwinter Nights doing some multi-queued behaviours) was that the game completely and utterly fails to capture the social greetings we humans use.

In a typical game, you have an agent approach another agent and what you typically see is the second agent swivel on the spot to face towards its newly percieved interacting agent. But this completely fails to capture even the most basic of human behaviours. The hug!

Of course, there are good reasons why games fail to implement things like hugging, or even hand shaking. Mostly involved with the cost of actually capturing the motions and applying them to multiple agents. But a second issue is that it can actually be very hard to synchronize multiple agents with enough positional accuracy that they can physically touch each other without causing interpenetration of the various limbs. Adding on top the problem of having suitable animations available during any discourse between the characters you generally get a fairly poor representation of discussion. That is when there is even any inter-agent conversation. RPG’s are probably the major force for inter agent discussion scenarios and yet they still fail to capture much of the human behaviour involved in even rudimentary communication acts. First person games? Don’t even ask.

It gets even more complicated when you consider the effect of having a group of agents in this social situation (imagine an agent joining a group of half a dozen other agents, how would you approach this task if you were trying to make them feel more human?). One thing I’ve been observing is that human beings typically never spin on the spot. Why is it that games think that spinning on the spot is acceptable? Another thing is that different agents attitudes to different group members can be quite diverse. I used to work with a guy called Jan Ruud (who lived up to his name quite often) who had a habit of standing between any women and the rest of the group. Clearly this was his attempt at securing the female attention for himself. Now Jan was quite a unique case in that he actually did this quite deliberately and without any qualms. But this sort of behaviour actually happens quite a lot in any social grouping. People react differently based on friendships and current moods. Try looking at any group of your friends and watch what happens when another friend joins the group. Does the original group reform its structure to allow the newcomer to integrate? Do some of them tend to face away from the newcomer? Do some of them face towards?

I’m trying to get permission to do some actual video recording of these situations. Because they are fascinating to try and recreate using AI techniques. Learning how to create agents that interact with each other in a more human manner should offer some insights into the formation and dispersion of social groups that might be useful to games. Certainly it has made me look at social interactions with new eyes.

So, when do you think we will see games with agents in them that actually go up and hug their virtual friends?

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