Gamers want realism, but we also want enemy AI to respect our need for fun, meaning we don’t want our enemies to be super smart. We need our inept guards to eat discarded poisoned rice balls. We need our machine gun-toting soldiers to ignore a conspicuous cardboard box. Otherwise, the game wouldn’t be fun. A truly intelligent enemy NPC is not what we want. We don’t even want artificial intelligence. We want scripted behaviors based on shortcut heuristics with game balance--not realism--being the end goal.
Tag Archives Uncanny Canyon
There’s a strange phenomenon in the world of visual character creation—puppetry, animated cartoons, robotics—where the more closely a character resembles a human, the more sympathy that character elicits and the more compassion we give it…until a certain point. This gap is called The Uncanny Canyon. But how does this concept work in fiction? Here, I answer that very question.