Worksheet 1

State the topic of interest that you may wish to take forward into a project.

Behavioural and Cognitive animation.

Indicate the issues surrounding this topic that you may wish investigate.

Methods of implementing each of these into a gaming situation. Advantages one has over the other. Whether or not these techniques improve upon the gaming experience or not. Can a model learn and react upon its environment fully without the use of any pre-determined animations?

Outline your initial ideas about how you would carry out the practical aspects of the project. i.e. what do you envisage yourself actually doing for the project.

I could create an application where a character would be placed in an environment created by and customized by the user. The model would behave dependant on what the user places into the environment. It may also be possible to integrate personality traits to the character and the user would need to cater to this. Two versions of this application could be made one from a behavioral stand point, the other from the cognitive stand point to determine which is more efficient/ more realistic to implement into a game.

Another option would be simply to have a “pet” of some variety. The user would have to effectively train the “pet” to show them what is right and what is wrong. The character would learn both from direct user input (violence/ shouting/ adoration/ praise) and from the environmental input from the user (rewards/ taking away of toys etc). The character would behave appropriately and “learn” from character input, continuing to do good things they would get praise for, and stop doing the bad things that they would be punished for.