New And Surprising Ways to Be Mean. Adversarial NPCs with Coupled Empowerment Minimisation
This addresses the problem of designing believable NPCs for game developers, particularly in procedurally generated games, though it appears incremental as an extension of prior work.
The paper tackled the challenge of creating robust adversarial Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in games by extending a coupled empowerment maximisation framework with a minimisation policy, resulting in adaptive adversarial behavior that exploits game content facets without policy modifications.
Creating Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that can react robustly to unforeseen player behaviour or novel game content is difficult and time-consuming. This hinders the design of believable characters, and the inclusion of NPCs in games that rely heavily on procedural content generation. We have previously addressed this challenge by means of empowerment, a model of intrinsic motivation, and demonstrated how a coupled empowerment maximisation (CEM) policy can yield generic, companion-like behaviour. In this paper, we extend the CEM framework with a minimisation policy to give rise to adversarial behaviour. We conduct a qualitative, exploratory study in a dungeon-crawler game, demonstrating that CEM can exploit the affordances of different content facets in adaptive adversarial behaviour without modifications to the policy. Changes to the level design, underlying mechanics and our character's actions do not threaten our NPC's robustness, but yield new and surprising ways to be mean.