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Industry insight from journalist Paul “The Game Master” Hyman. [Reprinted with permission from “The Hollywood Reporter.”]
AI: THE SMART WAY TO GO
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“Halo 2” benefited from impressive AI. |
Artificial intelligence — or “AI” — is the Rodney Dangerfield of video game design. It gets no respect when it’s working great, as when it contributed to “Halo 2” and “Half-Life 2” becoming the hugely successful games that they are. But when game characters start walking into walls, everyone knows to blame the AI.
According to John Funge, high-quality graphics may be what attracts a player to a game, but it’s the AI and the gameplay that holds their attention. Funge is a co-founder and one of the leading scientists at iKuni Inc., a Palo, Alto, CA-based startup focusing on AI effects for video games. He’s a previous contributor to research labs at Sony Computer Entertainment America and Intel, and is the author of “Artificial Intelligence For Computer Games: An Introduction.” In a chat with videogames industry journalist Paul Hyman, Funge talks about why designers ought to think about AI when turning their IP into games, and how AI has the potential to become the new driving force behind video game innovation.
Paul Hyman: “Artificial intelligence” (AI) refers to the programming that acts as the brain for everything that isn’t controlled by the human player, is that correct? So that includes what gamers call “NPCs” — or “non-player characters” — which are those characters that are controlled by the computer?
John Funge: Exactly. Among other things, including the equivalent of what would be the director in a movie. Someone — or something — has to decide where to place the “camera” in a game to enable the player to see what’s going on. For example, in a football game like “Madden,” unless the camera is pointing at the ball, the player will never be able to see it to catch it. That’s actually one of the hardest AI problems there is in games, trying to …
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BLACKLEY: GAME MAKERS SHOULD CALL THE SHOTS
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Blackley: “What gamers want is just one thing — kickass entertainment.” |
When Creative Artists Agency brokered the deal for the forthcoming film version of “Halo,” it was a watershed moment in the process of how video games are morphed into movies. Microsoft, the publisher of the wildly popular video game, had commissioned the script and brought in a producer.
According to Seamus Blackley, the significance of the deal was that it was one of the few times that the creative people behind the game had played a critical role in the process of producing the movie. Blackley is an agent at CAA, where he works with Larry Shapiro and Ophir Lupu on projects involving video game creators, a community he knows well from prior experience. After stints at DreamWorks Interactive and Looking Glass Studios, Blackley was instrumental in the creation, design and launch of the Xbox game console while an executive at Microsoft. He later formed Capital Entertainment Group to finance and produce video games.
In a talk with videogames industry journalist Paul Hyman, Blackley talks about the “Halo” deal, focusing on the creative people and not technology, and the box office slump.
Paul Hyman: You were an original designer of the Xbox and so you must have some thoughts on the next generation of that console, the Xbox 360, and how it’s technical abilities are likely to affect the relationship between the movie and games industries.
Seamus Blackley: People are going to look at it and say, “Gosh, now consoles can finally draw movie-quality images.” But it’s not clear to me why that’s important. I mean, the increase in technology tends to obviate the importance of that technology. Once everybody can draw people who look realistic, the challenge is no longer drawing people who look realistic; now it’s making them do something interesting. That’s when you need to find people who can do that and that’s where the real meat is … setting up creative teams of people who know how to do something interesting with all that technology.
Hyman: But the gaming audience has always been one that’s impressed by technology …
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