The New York Times offers an interesting article about
how games are starting to create more sophisticated
non-player characters to make games more challeging
and interesting.
"As we try to create more immersive experiences, these
artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games
forward and this is one of the areas that could really
explode," Bing Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic
Arts, the No. 1 video game company, said after his talk
Wednesday night. "We hope that the folks here start thinking
about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics
is a feature or sound is a feature."
The New York Times article also discusses Facade, an interactive
story where players interact with computer-controlled characters.
Facade was first introduced at the Artificial Intelligence and
Interactive Digital Entertainment conference. Facade will be
available as a free download later this summer. Here is a
description of Facade from the website:
Facade is an artificial intelligence-based art/research
experiment in electronic narrative – an attempt to move
beyond traditional branching or hyper-linked narrative to
create a fully-realized, one-act interactive drama.
Integrating an interdisciplinary set of artistic practices
and artificial intelligence technologies, we have completed
a four year collaboration to engineer a novel architecture
for supporting emotional, interactive character behavior
and drama-managed plot. Within this architecture we have built
a dramatically interesting, real-time 3D virtual world inhabited
by computer-controlled characters, in which the player experiences
a story from a first-person perspective. Facade will be publicly
released as a freeware cd-rom / download in early summer 2005.
The New York Times offers an 
