Skating the Infosphere

The earliest arcade games were built on discrete logic and were strictly based on competition between the players. Therefore there wasn’t any A.I. system.

Peculiar methods have been used in the arcade games. A [popular system of managing an NPC in the game was by scripting.

Path finding is a commonly used A.I. system in the real time strategy games. Path finding determines how to get an NPC from one place to another after considering the terrain and obstacles.

Games like Quake and Pursuit based all the enemy moves on particular stored patterns. The space invaders further improved these actions by adding in-game events which were dependent on the hash functions.

This resulted in more varied and complex enemy movements.

Pac-Man not only adopted this technology but also added different personalities for each ghosts.

Even though the ghost movements in Pac-Man appeared random, in reality it was a scripted and disguised action.

The 1990s saw the emergence of finite state machines. The arcade racing games were powered by a ‘rubber banding’ A.I. system.

If the computer decided the opponents “fall behind”, they received a superb boost allowing them to catch up.

The system too, works the other way around, enabling the human players to catch up if they fall behind. A good arcade shhoting game must have a large rule base - list of NPC options like attack long range, call for help, flee etc.

The secret lies in using a random factor to choose from this base factor. This has provided an increased sense of intellect and improved the entertainment quotient.

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