Esports Agents with a Theory of Mind: Towards Better Engagement, Education, and Engineering
This addresses the problem of improving AI's effectiveness in esports for players, but it is a position paper with incremental ideas rather than new results.
The paper argues that AI agents in esports need a theory of mind to infer players' tactics and intents, proposing human-in-the-loop approaches for embedding this into behavioral models to enhance player engagement, skills, and coaching.
The role of AI in esports is shifting from leveraging games as a testbed for improving AI algorithms to addressing the needs of the esports players such as enhancing their gaming experience, esports skills, and providing coaching. For AI to be able to effectively address such needs in esports, AI agents require a theory of mind, that is, the ability to infer players' tactics and intents. To that end, in this position paper, we argue for human-in-the-loop approaches for the discovery and computational embedding of the theory of mind within behavioral models of esports players. We discuss that such approaches can be enabled by player-centric investigations on situated cognition that will expand our understanding of the cognitive and other unobservable factors that influence esports players' behaviors. We conclude by discussing the implications of such a research direction in esports as well as broader implications in engineering design and design education.