Game/AI

I've been invited to speak at the AIIDE '09 Conference from October 14-16 at Stanford University.

I know, I know -- I've left the industry to get an MBA, so what am I doing giving a talk on game AI?

I don't really have time for it, but I'm still on the Program Committee and I couldn't turn down an invitation. I've had a lot of big things kicking around in my head for years, so it's great to finally have a chance to let them out.

The talk is "Game Design: An AI Perspective." I couldn't resist the urge to make it rhyme with Will Wright's brilliant lecture from AIIDE '05 (yes, it's kind of incomprehensible with just the slides and no audio, but trust me -- you should have been there!)

I'm also going to be talking a bit about the emergent gameplay design paradigm that's been a slowly growing undercurrent in game design for the last decade or so. Emergent gameplay sometimes works amazingly well. At the same time, there's something missing, and I think the theory is incomplete to the point of being dangerous.

So I'll be talking about that a bit and seeing if we can't put "emergent gameplay" in what I think is a new context.

Hope to see y'all there!

Posted by PaulT at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I finally got around to posting some presentations from the past couple months, including

Beyond Behavior: Introduction to Knowledge Representation, from the AI Summit at GDC 09

and

Next-Gen Content Creation for Next-Gen AI, my invited talk from FDG 09.

This has been a part of the ongoing effort to get all my old talks and presentations on-line and available off my Naimad Games publications page.

The FDG talk was something of a follow-up to the AI Summit's Photoshop of AI panel, and is a talk I would like to continue to evolve. One of the great things about it is that I had a lot of help making it. Part of the point of the talk was "okay, forget this theoretical future photoshop of AI: how are we making AI content right now?" If you look through the slides, you'll see screenshots of various internal AI tools that some awesome peeps were kind enough to send me.

Hopefully it's interesting, and in the meantime, thanks so much again to Alex and Petra Champandard, Michael Dawe, Chris Jurney, Brett Laming, Steve Mariotti, Jeff Orkin, Stuart Reynolds and Brian Schwab!

Posted by naimad at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I wrote in January 2008 about my dear colleague Mark Haigh-Hutchinson and his upcoming book, Real-Time Cameras.

This essential book -- the ultimate guide to game camera systems -- has now been released.

I'm thrilled with how it turned out, and I'd like to thank fellow editors Jack Mathews, Ryan Cornelius, Jim Gage, Mark DeLoura, Steve McCrea, Akintunde Omitowoju, Eric Rehmeyer, and Marco Thrush for all their hard work in making this book a reality.

Pick up your copy here.

-Paul Tozour

Posted by PaulT at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)