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Social Simulation in Games
The document discusses simulating social interactions in games and some of the challenges involved. It notes that social simulations could shed light on complex real-life situations like conflict resolution. Effective social simulations would need to represent different types of social practices and interactions, and allow agents to learn new behaviors based on player actions. The goal would be to tackle understanding complicated human social dynamics.
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Social Simulation in Games
- 1. May 2012 Mini-talk atDagstuhl Seminar 12191, "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games"l Mirjam P Eladhari, with help from Richard Evans and Michael Mateas
- 2. An introduction to discussions in the seminar, that could be about why we would want to simulate social interactions in games and, some of the main research challenges in the field.
- 7. A 3act drama played in one single room, one chamber (Kammarspel, Kammerspiel)
- 8. As if we want to open the lid into the private. That which is behind the fascade. What’s *really* going on.
- 10. As if we want to open the lid into the private. That which is behind the fascade. What’s *really* going on. Especially in situations that are complex, tricky, that we try to understand. That – the purpose of so much art, to better understand the human condition
- 14. Add Michaels’ slides
- 15.
- 20. My Siminvited his boss over for dinner. When he arrived, my Sim let him in - but then he went to have a bath! He didn’t understand that certain things were expected of him as a host. 20
- 21. Visiting Picnic Bedtime Parties Fights
- 24. Entertainment? Usefulness?Use to understand complex real situations better? (eg conflict resolution in SIREN, or to be ‘good stranger’ in IMMERSE?) l'art pour l'art? Exploration of human condition? (etc)
- 25. The term Socialrefers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.
- 31. breadth: we have so many different types of practice. A robust social simulation should be able to represent all these different types of practice. simulation that works in both single- and multiplayer. It should be agnostic about which characters were PCs and which were NPCs agents to learn new types of social practice based on player behaviour. (currently: coded up by engineers.)
- 37. Tackle thehard bits. The complex situations in life that we need help understanding. SMGA? The social model agent.
- 41. Reminisce • Accept orReject based determined by considerations • Most salient response chosen • Each changes the social world in different ways Accept • Y has done something to embarrass Z recently • X is enemies with Z •
- 43. “In Southeast Asia, smooth otters typically occur in social groups consisting of an adult male- female pair and their young.” Most male and female river otters form separate dominance hierarchies. The highest ranking males occupy the most favorable ranges. Males and females normally tolerate - but do not accompany - each other. A female with young may become dominant to males.
- 44. 1. River otters tend to be solitary and fairly territorial. Avoidance is a very significant factor in river otter social behavior. • River otters defend their territories by marking, scratching, and occasionally fighting. • Male river otters ignore females and young through most of the year. 2. Giant otters are more social than river otters, but separate groups tend to avoid each other. Giant otters are more social than river otters, but separate groups tend to avoid each other.
Editor's Notes
- #5 Social Simulation in Games – Tradition Dollhouse Nuremberg, 17 th cent.
- #6 The Sims, 2000
- #7 Little Computer people 1985 Compare to books for youth – outdoors adventure for boys, indoor domestic stuff for girls.
- #8 Dollhouses. Girls play. Girls books, and boys boos. Boy books outdoors, seeking adventure. Girsl books, indoors, domestic. Entertainment preparing for adult roles. Play does too. Once adult then: something which is also indoors is the chamber play Compare: Childerns Play: learn the norms to know how you are supposed to act as an adult. Going to see theater, drama, art: as an adult trying to better understand the human condition. Magdi Salehs debutpjäs “Den tredje spegeln” på Teater Lederman pekar på hur bland annat posttraumatisk stress kastar skuggor över relationer. Linnéa och David har varit gifta i tio år, och är ofrivilligt barnlösa. Åtminstone ur Davids synpunkt som återkommande lyfter frågan om att flytta till en större lägenhet utanför stan, vilket Linnéa inte vill. Upplägget är bekant, om ett äktenskap som knakar i fogarna av den anledningen att den ena parten önskar barn, medan den andra är negativ – själva frågan blir blott ett irritationsmoment för Linnéa.
- #9 As if, if we look into the doll house, we would see the absolute truth. See WHAT IS REALLY going on, because the little people in the box would not know that they are observed. //the complete openness of the sims house, even taking them to the toilet. The fly on the wall. The ultimate anthropologist.
- #11 As if, if we look into the doll house, we would see the absolute truth. See WHAT IS REALLY going on, because the little people in the box would not know that they are observed. //the complete openness of the sims house, even taking them to the toilet. The fly on the wall. The ultimate anthropologist.
- #12 Other tricky situations. The school yard. Many agents. Sandbox system Could be a system for story construction. (social simulations can be seen as story construction systems, or dramatic systems, since the play of them always result in a discourse, that can be narrated in retrospect) ...openness of systems likely to provide a large number of answers to why. A high level of interesting ness. Psych Sim (Stacy Marcella) Prom Week
- #13 Other tricky situations. The school yard. Psych Sim (Stacy Marcella) Prom Week
- #14 Picked a scenario for testing the agent system, don’t claim to make an exact copy of what bullying is like. More to see how we can model agents to act upon beleifs about other agents. PsychSim: Modeling Theory of Mind with Decision-Theoretic Agents David V. Pynadath and Stacy C. Marsella (Information Sciences 2005) Agent-based modeling of human social behavior is an increasingly important research area. A key factor in human social interaction is our beliefs about others, a theory of mind. Whether we believe a message depends not only on its content but also on our model of the communicator. How we act depends not only on the immediate effect but also on how we believe others will react. In this paper, we discuss PsychSim, an implemented multiagent-based simulation tool for modeling interactions and influence. While typical approaches to such modeling have used first-order logic, Psych-Sim agents have their own decision-theoretic model of the world, including beliefs about its environment and recursive models of other agents. Using these quantitative models of uncertainty and preferences, we have translated existing psychological theories into a decision-theoretic semantics that allow the agents to reason about degrees of believability in a novel way. We discuss PsychSims underlying architecture and describe its application to a school violence scenario for illustration.
- #16 What is prom week’s big mission? Big vision of making social space playable. It makes us very happy that Prom Week was chosen as a finalist in this year’s Independent Games Festival in the Technical Excellence category. So, why make a playable model of social space?
- #17 Distinction between what needs to be authored (green) and what CiF does with the authored parts (orange). Introducing these is a slog – should we assume this is obvious given the game design saavy crowd?
- #18 Be more clear about how to guide people’s eyes through what is happening.
- #19 //START RICHARD-SLIDES Lets look at an example
- #20 Visiting is a social practice. The term comes from Wittgenstein.
- #21 The problem was that the social situation of visiting was not being modeled. The host did not understand his responsibilities as a host – that he should look after his guest.
- #22 We implemented many practices in The Sims 3, including: //END RICHARD SLIDES
- #23 "the reason for dispute" - social interaction (at least as a metaphor in play) into with the individual the dispute is with but with the 'reason'. Making an abstracted instantiation. Transcend
- #24 Alice and Kev Alice and Kev is a story about two homeless characters in Sims 3, played and written about by Robin Burkinshaw. Burkinshaw writes about what happens as he playes the game, each interpretation he makes in the text is based on an event. Burkinshaw has made characters that appear, as many of the people commenting on the story says, as real people. Real people as in round characters that can act in a way that clearly distinguish them as characters with personalities, but still behave in interesting and surprising ways. My favorite chapter is “Selflessness” . The character Alice has after many hardships finally managed to get her first salary. Only to give it away… It’s almost painful to read, knowing how much she needs that little money herself. Burkinshaw expresses in the text how his role as author/player becomes dramatic by the need to make a choice – he doesn’t really want Alice to give the money away, but lets her anyway, letting her act according to her character. It is also interesting is to read the comments on the chapter, where the first comments are about how real Alice feels as a character, and how beautiful her gift of charity is. Then comes another interpretation by the user Danuab: “It doesn’t mean anything. Alice has likely internalised her father’s distaste and abuse and developed a negative self-concept. She isn’t giving money away because she’s altruistic, she’s giving it away because she doesn’t think she’s worth it.” // obs intentionality, Dennet 1987, Agre, 1997 Now we are talking. Not only have we a game that can not only generate emergent story construction that is seen by players as meaningful enough to narrate to others, we also have critical comments and interpretations of the narrative and the characters.
- #25 " Art for art's sake " is the usual English rendering of a French slogan from the early 19th century, '' l'art pour l'art'' , and expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only "true" art, is divorced from any didactic , moral or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes described as " autotelic ", from the Greek autoteles , “complete in itself”, a concept that has been expanded to embrace "inner-directed" or "self-motivated" human beings. The human condition encompasses the unique and believed to be inescapable features of being human in a social, cultural, and personal context. It can be described as the irreducible part of humanity that is inherent and not connected to factors such as gender, race or class. It includes concerns such as a search for purpose, search for gratification, sense of curiosity, the inevitability of isolation, or the fear of death. The "human condition" is especially studied through the set of disciplines and sub-fields that make up the humanities . The study of history, philosophy, literature, and the arts all help understand the nature of the human condition and the broader cultural and social arrangements that make up human lives. The human condition is the subject of such fields of study as philosophy , theology , sociology , psychology , anthropology , demographics , evolutionary biology , cultural studies , and sociobiology . The philosophical school of existentialism deals with the ongoing search for ultimate meaning in the human condition.
- #27 Tie back to psych sim, Point: when building simultations we also reflect mental models about what we believe that humans or other social entities are like. Or a theory, etc etc. Or mimic mammals. Also note; when we model sound behaviors it is acts, computational processes as metaphors for social actions “ dominate” compare emote.
- #28 But we could just as well be otters and hold hands instead Emote: hold hand
- #29 In the constant quest to not take anything for granted, consider The combo of the metaphor, The genre The technique Impact of that. Mental models of social interactions. - The mental models we use in ordinary life (a pack of wolves more often than a flock of elephants or otters) The mental models we use in different research communities. (like the prevailing big 5, and other popular models in the IVA community) ...and how these are used together existing AI technicies, as well as with existing design paradigms. New types of social simulations create genres. (sims - a genre on its own, in the same way as Myst was a genre of its own)
- #32 A sample of challenges – from richard, from Michael, from me. Others in the audience. Start a list? RICHARD: - what was the main challenge in building the social simulation aspects of sims3? It was persuading the team to try new technology. There was resistance at EA to adding anything to the Sims, when it was already a successful franchise. Another problem was that the way we implemented social practices in Sims 3 (inheriting from a base class: SocialPractice) meant that adding a new practice was time-consuming and error-prone. - when you were done w sims3, what did you see as the major future challenges? I felt the main next challenge was scaling up: being able to produce tons of practices quickly and painlessly. One way of doing this is to design a Domain Specific Language for describing social practices. (This is what I do in Cotillion; using a Domain Specific Language called Praxis, we have built lots more practices, and they are much deeper). - then, broader: what do you see as the main challenges in the field of social simulation in games? One challenge is breadth: we have so many different types of practice (playful practices e.g. games, legal practices, educational practices, communicative practices, etc etc) . A robust social simulation should be able to represent all these different types of practice. Another challenge is creating a simulation that works in both single- and multiplayer. Ideally, a social simulation would be agnostic about which characters were PCs and which were NPCs. Any character in the simulation should be playable by a PC or NPC. This requirement is not met by many social simulations currently. Another challenge is concurrency: real situations often involve people participating in multiple practices concurrently. A social simulation must be able to model concurrency. Another challenge (much harder, and imo one that should only be done when the previous challenges are better understood) is getting the agents to learn new types of social practice based on player behaviour. Most social simulations I know (with the exception of Jeff Orkin's work and unreleased stuff at Deep Mind) use a static set of practices which have been coded up by engineers. A machine-learning approach would allow the computer agents to dynamically build up representations of social practice dynamically by e.g. watching the player. This would enable players to train the computer characters to participate in arbitrary new practices
- #33 - The pre study was aimed at finding evidence for social behavour, Dynamic behaviour All games where studied with carley and newel in mind. Model social agent WE DO NOT FOCUS ON THE CONVERSATIONAL ASPECTS!!! The nature of the social agent, 1994. Carley and Newell Journal of mathematical sociology. The Model Social Game Agent Give agents social awareness and actions accordings to norms. Ecaluation of own norms in relation to group norms. BUT – don’t forget the ant (Herbert, sciences of the artificial) What to put in agent, and what to put in world?
- #34 Existing in current games. Adaption – deus ex.
- #35 Many of the design goals used for the Social Model Game Agent are inspired by this overview from Carley and Newell from 1994. Work by Harko Verhagen, Magnus Johansson and myself.
- #36 Michael will here, vocally, list some of the main challenges.
- #38 I for example read poetry when I am in crises. That’s when I need the art too, when I am touched by it, when I ma helped, consoled, and when I can transcend from my own little puddle of misery and perhaps get some peace, at least for a little while. I wish for the existence of games that can do that, or similarly profound stuff.
- #40 Now Josh will explain how to go from an abstract social exchange to creating a concrete character performance…
- #43 “ In Southeast Asia, smooth otters typically occur in social groups consisting of an adult male-female pair and their young.” Most male and female river otters form separate dominance hierarchies. The highest ranking males occupy the most favorable ranges. Males and females normally tolerate - but do not accompany - each other. A female with young may become dominant to males. 1. River otters tend to be solitary and fairly territorial. Avoidance is a very significant factor in river otter social behavior. • River otters defend their territories by marking, scratching, and occasionally fighting. • Male river otters ignore females and young through most of the year. 2. Giant otters are more social than river otters, but separate groups tend to avoid each other. Giant otters are more social than river otters, but separate groups tend to avoid each other.
- #46 Not only multi agent sys or fully aut agents, also the player entity, control object or avatar