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Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) help motivate player engagement with narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, which emotion often drives in…

We present an approach for enhancing non-playable characters (NPCs) in games by combining large language models (LLMs) with computer vision to provide contextual awareness of their surroundings. Conventional NPCs typically rely on…

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for creating dynamic non-player characters (NPCs) in gaming environments, enabling both functional task execution and persona-consistent dialogue generation. In this…

In video games, non-player characters (NPCs) play a pivotal role in shaping players' experiences. The design of these characters, encompassing their appearance and behaviors, can be manipulated in terms of coherence and consistency to…

Recent advancements in deep reinforcement learning have brought forth an impressive display of highly skilled artificial agents capable of complex intelligent behavior. In video games, these artificial agents are increasingly deployed as…

There is a high demand for high-quality Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in video games. Hand-crafting their behavior is a labor intensive and error prone engineering process with limited controls exposed to the game designers. We propose to…

Mixed-motive scenarios are ubiquitous in real-world multi-agent interactions, where self-interested agents often defect for immediate rewards, overlooking the potential of altruistic cooperation to improve long-term gains and collective…

This study examines how large language model-driven non-player characters (LLM-NPCs) affect players' cognitive load and gaming experience, with a particular focus on the underlying psychological mechanisms, differences across task…

Recent advances in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) have largely focused on improving the performance of agents with the aim of replacing humans in known and well-defined environments. The use of these techniques as a game design tool for…

Conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in games are typically confined to dialogue between a human player and a virtual agent, where the conversation is initiated and controlled by the player. To create richer, more believable…

Models of intrinsic motivation present an important means to produce sensible behaviour in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Applications in video games are varied, and range from intrinsically motivated general game-playing agents to…

The use of generative AI in video game development is on the rise, and as the conversational and other capabilities of large language models continue to improve, we expect LLM-driven non-player characters (NPCs) to become widely deployed.…

In this paper, we introduce a skill-balancing mechanism for adversarial non-player characters (NPCs), called Skilled Experience Catalogue (SEC). The objective of this mechanism is to approximately match the skill level of an NPC to an…

In this paper we propose an architecture for specifying the interaction of non-player characters (NPCs) in the game-world in a way that abstracts common tasks in four main conceptual components, namely perception, deliberation, control,…

In an adversarial environment, a hostile player performing a task may behave like a non-hostile one in order not to reveal its identity to an opponent. To model such a scenario, we define identity concealment games: zero-sum stochastic…

Current game world models simulate environments from a subjective, player-centric perspective. However, by treating the Non-Player Character (NPC) merely as background pixels, these models cannot capture interactions between the player and…

Applying neural network (NN) methods in games can lead to various new and exciting game dynamics not previously possible. However, they also lead to new challenges such as the lack of large, clean datasets, varying player skill levels, and…

In recent years, agents have become capable of communicating seamlessly via natural language and navigating in environments that involve cooperation and competition, a fact that can introduce social dilemmas. Due to the interleaving of…

Language Model (LM)-based agents remain largely untested in mixed-motive settings where agents must leverage short-term cooperation for long-term competitive goals (e.g., multi-party politics). We introduce Cooperate to Compete (C2C), a…

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…