[MUD-Dev] Cognitively Interesting Combat (was Better Combat)

[Paolo Piselli]

--- David Kennerly <kennerly at finegamedesign.com> wrote:

> I doubt how theorems of games can deny their pixelated roots in
> discrete mathematics, which may include game trees, tree
> algorithms, and game mechanics.  I have no disparages for what
> cognitive

IMO, the goal at hand is not to come up with an algorithm for the
purpose of solving the game, the goal is to model a human's
cognition of the game for the purpose of evalutation and adjustment
of the game.  It would be very hard to argue that a human
tic-tac-toe player does a brute-force expansion of the entire game
tree, or that a computer abstracts chess board-states in the same
way that a professional Go player does.  Do the algorithms developed
for Deep Blue give us any insight into how people think about chess,
or how to teach people to play a better game fo chess?

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a zealous supporter of ACT-R or
anything (http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/), but I do think that a
production model can be a useful tool for thinking about how a human
player experiences a game.

>> These decisions need to be made over and over again during the
>> course of one "combat" because the conditions have changed for
>> each iteration of the high-level goal-loop.

> One unrepresented class of working memory elements (or "chunks")
> is not any of these steps but is the goal itself.  The decision to
> break-big-blocks itself requires tactical assessment.  Against a
> human opponent, which often happens in Puzzle Fighter (if a second
> player is present) or Yohoho Puzzle Pirates, the opponent can
> adjust to these strategies, in which case a player needs to adopt,
> if to win, a contingent strategy.

These higher-order goals can also be represented in a production
system, and we can simply add new rules and adjust old rules of our
novice model to arrive at a more advanced player model.  This is
analogous to how some researchers theorize about human learning.

> Any interesting game has this property.  It is almost implicit in
> the defintion of "interesting."  It sustatins attention precisely
> because failure to pay attention to the strategies employed is a
> sufficient condition to lose against an opponent who, e ceritibus
> paribus (all things being held constant), only differs in that his
> strategy includes responding to the other player's strategy.

I agree, and so does the metric from my previous email ;) Consider
that every time a player responds to an event it means a rule in our
model has fired.

-Paolo

=====
Paolo Piselli
ppiselli at yahoo.com
www.piselli.com , www.bestcoastswing.com
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