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Tech

Saying a Game Has 'AI' Makes It Better (Because No One Knows What It Means)

Saying a game AI is like saying a drink has electrolytes.
Don't Starve. Image: Klei Entertainment

Tell a patient a pill is a painkiller, and they'll feel it working, even if there were no active compounds in it. But the placebo effect isn't just for medicine: A group of researchers recently found that telling players a game features advanced artificial intelligence (AI) will make the game feel more immersive, even if it doesn't feature AI at all.

To test the placebo effect in games and how player expectation changes their experience, Alena Denisova and Paul Cairns, researchers at the department of computer science at York University, told players that Don't Starve, a 2D game where they must forage for food and build tools to survive in the wilderness, featured "adaptive AI" that could design the map around their level of skill. It doesn't.

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The 21 test subjects played a round they were told was randomly generated, followed by a round they were told was controlled by an AI. They said that the round controlled by AI was more immersive and entertaining, even though in reality both rounds were randomly generated, as they always are in Don't Starve.

Cairns said that the reason this worked is that players are vaguely familiar with the term "AI," which they expect to react accordingly to how they play, but don't necessarily really understand how it works. They know it's supposed to do something, but they're not sure what or how.

"You can say this game has extra technology in it that will improve the gaming experience, and that's a problem because people will believe it"

"If we said, we're going to use substrate X microchip facilitators, people have no idea what that is, and they don't have an expected response to the consequences of that," Cairns told Motherboard in a phone interview. "When you give a real placebo you say to them, this is for your headache, and so the headache gets better. You look for what you expect, and then you see what you're looking for."

"Adaptative AI," Cairns said, is something people who play games might have heard of, but don't know what it does, and therefore fill in the blanks to create an experience they're expecting. You look for what you expect, and then you see what you're looking for.

Conversely, players might be able to tell that a game isn't really running at a high frame rate even if you suggest that it does, because they're familiar enough with what higher frame rates look like.

However, Cairns speculated that this experiment could have also worked with other suggestions that were more blatantly not true.

"If you told people that graphics were better in the game, because there are lots of ways graphics can be better, and we're actually surprisingly poor at knowing what we're seeing, that could work too" he said.

This is something video games are already doing. Just perusing the Steam store, you can find games claiming "dynamic and procedurally generated AI opponents," "high-end next-gen visuals," and "A new motion engine [that] generates smarter, hyper-realistic movement." Those sound good, but do you really know what it means?

"Obviously, you can misuse it, you can say this game has adaptive AI, or this game has extra technology in it that will improve the gaming experience, and that's a problem because people will believe it, at least initially, and that's enough to sell your game," Cairns said.