The revival of the discussion about trying to generate human-looking faces versus displaying some iconic representation (or just a name) of an NPC got me thinking about the (relatively) old rule in game AI: a system that is perceived as behaving plausibly but is simple internally has much more value for a game than a system that achieves the appearance of complexity because it really is complex internally.
This is the very first observation in Will Wright's presentation,
AI: A Design Perspective, presented at the First Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference.
This PowerPoint presentation, which Wright created around the time of The Sims 2 and Spore, doesn't contain Wright's actual remarks at the presentation... but the gist of his ideas is there in his Observations. And they are very much worth taking a look at by anyone who wants to create plausible actors in a game.
The above was the public stuff. This link is to the
full list of papers presented at the conference. This link is for everyone EXCEPT JOSH. Josh is not permitted to follow this link, because it leads to a black hole of game AI notions from which he will never emerge. And we don't want that. But you who are not Josh -- you are permitted to read these papers.