Emergent Perception and Video Games that Listen: Applying Sonic Virtuality for Creative and Intelligent NPC Behaviours

‘Non-player characters (NPCs)’ can present well-crafted

behaviours and evoke engaging and immersive player experiences

but such behaviour in current NPCs is illusory

and only achievable within a controlled and linear/fixed

video game context. NPCs struggle greatly to

portray flexible or creative behaviours within an adaptive

or procedurally generated environment and this is even

more apparent in their relationship with sound. This paper

posits that recent theoretical developments in cognitive

psychology offer significant opportunity to advance

NPC-AI and proposes that an intelligence framework,

based upon Sonic Virtuality and integrated within an

NPC, would offer distinct advantages over current systems.

To illustrate this vision, a roadmap for future work

is laid out using Sonic Virtuality as the foundation for a

‘synthetic listener’; an NPC capable of responding to

procedurally generated and external (player-domain) audio.

As a philosophical exploration, underlying principles

are considered for other perception modalities, presenting

an avenue of games-AI research that, ultimately,

could dramatically improve NPC- ‘humanness’ and

evoke a player-immersion and presence equivalent to

linear/fixed AI but in much bigger, more complex virtual

worlds.