Abstract
Building artificial intelligence for games is an extremely involved process, and the cost of developing AI for minor characters may be greater than the payoff in increased immersion. Affordances, used to create smart objects, reduce the complexity of character controllers. While affordances improve the complexity of individual controllers, the technique does not take advantage of environmental information to reduce the behavioral decision space. We present contextual affordances, which extend basic affordances to use context from object, agent, and environmental state to present only the most relevant actions to characters. We show how contextual affordances improve even random-decision agents, and discuss the complexity of building contextual objects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
BioWare. Dragon Age: Origins, Fantasy Role-Playing Game (2009), http://dragonage.bioware.com/
Cerpa, D.H., Champandard, A., Dawe, M.: Behavior Trees: Three Ways of Cultivating Strong AI. Talk at the 2010 AI Summit at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) (2010), http://gdcvault.com/play/1012744/Behavior-Trees-Three-Ways-of
Gibson, J.J.: The theory of affordances. In: Gibson, J.J. (ed.) Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah (1977)
Isla, D.: Handling Complexity in the Halo 2 AI. In: Proceedings of the 2005 Game Developers Conference (2005)
Matarić, M.J.: Behavior-based control: Main properties and implications. In: Proceedings, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Workshop on Architectures for Intelligent Control Systems, pp. 46–54 (1992)
Norman, D.A.: The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, New York (2002)
Orkin, J.: Three States and a Plan: The AI of F.E.A.R. In: Proceedings of the Game Developer’s Conference, GDC (2006)
Simpson, J.: Scripting and Sims2: Coding the Psychology of Little People. Talk at the 2005 Game Developers Conference (GDC) (2005), https://www.cmpevents.com/Sessions/GD/ScriptingAndSims2.ppt
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Heckel, F.W.P., Youngblood, G.M. (2011). Contextual Affordances for Intelligent Virtual Characters. In: Vilhjálmsson, H.H., Kopp, S., Marsella, S., Thórisson, K.R. (eds) Intelligent Virtual Agents. IVA 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6895. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23974-8_22
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23973-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23974-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)