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Motivated reinforcement learning for non-player characters in persistent computer game worlds

Published: 14 June 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Massively multiplayer online computer games are played in complex, persistent virtual worlds. Over time, the landscape of these worlds evolves and changes as players create and personalise their own virtual property. In contrast, many non-player characters that populate virtual game worlds possess a fixed set of pre-programmed behaviours and lack the ability to adapt and evolve in time with their surroundings. This paper presents motivated reinforcement learning agents as a means of creating non-player characters that can both evolve and adapt. Motivated reinforcement learning agents explore their environment and learn new behaviours in response to interesting experiences, allowing them to display progressively evolving behavioural patterns. In dynamic worlds, environmental changes provide an additional source of interesting experiences triggering further learning and allowing the agents to adapt their existing behavioural patterns in time with their surroundings.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ACE '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGCHI international conference on Advances in computer entertainment technology
June 2006
572 pages
ISBN:1595933808
DOI:10.1145/1178823
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 June 2006

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Author Tags

  1. computer games
  2. motivation
  3. persistent virtual worlds
  4. reinforcement learning

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  • (2022)Fusing Blockchain and AI With Metaverse: A SurveyIEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society10.1109/OJCS.2022.31882493(122-136)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2021)A Method for Behavior Change Support by Controlling Psychological Effects on Walking Motivation Caused by Step Count Log Competition SystemSensors10.3390/s2123801621:23(8016)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2021
  • (2021)Towards a multi-agent non-player character road network: a Reinforcement Learning approach2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619047(1-5)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2021
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  • (2018)Review of Intrinsic Motivation in Simulation-based Game TestingProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173921(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2018)Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Worlds – Toward Human-Level AI AgentsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2018.28559706(39976-39988)Online publication date: 2018
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  • (2017)Zombies Arena: fusion of reinforcement learning with augmented reality on NPCCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-017-0969-221:1(655-666)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2017
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