The New Scientist has a nice link to a report (PDF alert) from some Austrian AI specialists, which suggests that being neurotic may be a key competitive advantage in gaming. Working with Age Of Mythology, they’ve set out to discover if the attractiveness of a game is affected by how emotionally or neurotically the AI within it behaves. By creating four bots, with normal, aggressive, defensive and neurotic personalities, they discovered that the neurotic version was the most successful, winning as often as the aggressive AI, and in substantially quicker times.

The hallmarks of a neurotic AI? Extreme playing styles, and an irrational assessment of available resources. You’re welcome to quibble about whether or not those are reasonable extrapolations of neuroticism, as defined by the Big Five factors of personality the researchers were working from, but they certainly aren’t traits most game AI designers are aiming for.

I suspect the researchers will ultimately find what any seasoned gamer could have told them off the bat: emotional, irrational AIs sound like a great idea, but it practice they decrease the attractiveness of the game to the player. Those carefully constructed irrationalities can all too often feel like buggy, unfair flaws rather than a sophisticated approximation of a human. AI doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to be reliable - I have extremely fond memories of Advance War’s rock-solid, flawed CPU opponents, who could be relied on to pursue cheap, empty APCs rather than your more valuable units. If they had only done it erratically, it would have driven me mad. But do it rain or shine, day or night, and it becomes a tactical tool.

For many gamers, however, playing against any AI is a shoddy second-best, no substitute for the unpredictable thrill of playing against real people. But isn’t that a contradiction? If unpredictability is a bonus in a human opponent, why is it a flaw in a mechanical one? Here’s the research I’d like those Austrians to do next. Have people play against their neurotic bots. Tell half that it’s an AI opponent, and half that it’s another human player. I put my money on the second group having a better impression of the attractiveness of the game than the first. We’re just fundamentally more forgiving of people than we are of AIs. No wonder they’re turning neurotic.

I like it when games leak into the real world. While the thing that’s most valuable to me about playing is the lack of reality - I already have enough of that to keep me busy - I find it immensely pleasing when they reach out of their totally virtual, fictional, insubstantial worlds and make real things happen. I like it when Eternal Darkness makes me jump off the sofa to re-plug my spookily unplugged controller, or when Metal Gear makes me feel like a chump for not picking up a CD case. It’s not so much about merchandise - although I’m a sucker for that too - but about things that cross the divide and become real in the process. I’d like to put my hand on my heart and say that I wouldn’t fork out 4000 yen for a Final Fantasy potion, but given a bad enough day I would, and I don’t doubt for a moment that it would revive me. Assuming I wasn’t poisoned or turn to stone or anything.

So here are this week’s favourite bits of game leakage. The first is a stunning map of the first version of Zork. Keen-eyed Zork fans will notice there are locations there from all three Zork games, and that it’s dated before Zork’s original release. That’s because this is the map of the original, non-commercial game, sometimes known as Dungeon, which permeated across university mainframes from its birthplace at MIT in 1977. There’s a nice telling of the story of its creation, and of the founding of Infocom, here. The original PDP-10 version was too hefty for home computers of the time, so the game was split into three installments. This map, by Steven Roy, presumably a student fan at the time, sums up everything I love about games and everything I hate about Zork.

Too old for you? Then how about this marvelously impractical idea to have your car project hologramatic chevrons onto sharp curves, based on data from your GPS? And why stop there? Why not have Forza’s colour-coded racing line projected in front of you to help judge your speed? Why not have the GPS linked into automatic weather station feeds so it can alter the optimum speeds according to real-time reports of rain or frost? Why not have a combo-meter monitoring how ecologically you’re managing your gear changes? Please, no puncturing my enthusiasm with anything as prickly as common sense.

And if that picture is reminding you of something, then you might be glad of a link to Aram Batholl’s Speed, which is what it reminded me of - that real-world installation of Need For Speed’s chevrons on a street in Berlin. And if that’s reminding you of something, then you might be glad of a link to Benedict Radcliffe’s wireframe Impreza, which is what it reminded me of. Beyond that you’re on your own.

Addendum: Alright, fine - even I admit there are times when game-leakage can be a decidedly bad thing.

I’m always uncomfortable around game clones. In one respect they seem to represent the one of the things I like most about gaming culture - that it attracts crowds of iterative magpies, who love the games they play and love the idea that they could make them better. And, in others, it’s gaming at its worst: disrespectful, lazy, shabbily commercialised.

Can’t think what put that issue in my head, especially since I was playing MySims - the DS one - over the weekend. But whether or not you think it’s clone-ware, and whether or not you think clone-ware is evil, you can’t deny that it’s a game that had at its disposal not just a very close role model, but a role model of unusual excellence. So how is that that at every single stage of the first five minutes of MySims, it alienates and annoys me?

The first thing you hit is the language: ” Please choose the gender of your player character,” it asks frostily. Wow, I feel welcomed and connected to your cute, vibrant world. Has EA considered making a driving licence application process simulator, do you think? I reckon that’s a niche it could own.

But I choose, and so, a few hair-cuts and skin colours later, I’m dumped into the world. Town is due east, I’m told by the charisma-free ship’s captain. Great, I think, and prepare to set off, only to have my gender-assigned-player-character whisked out of my control. It trots into town, starts chasing a boy in a dog-helmet, runs out of puff (why couldn’t I chose the fitness of my player-character, hmm?) and decides to walk into a building. Brilliant. So much for me forging any early, precious sense of identity with that player-character. Why tell me I need to go east if you’re not going to let me go where I want? Why assume I’d want to chase the boy?

Never mind. Here I am in a house, with a woman. I can, the game chirps, ‘touch the Sim directly to initiate conversation’. I tell you, there’s not a weekend goes by here without our neighbours calling the police cos we’re all initiating conversations like crazy. Plus, if it’s suddenly OK to call her a Sim, why couldn’t we have been calling my player-character that from the beginning? Wouldn’t that have made it seem a bit more like an engaging, consistent world?

But here I am carping away, when this Sim, who I have touched, is experiencing a crisis. Her grandson is missing, and she’s too busy to talk to me. Also too busy, it seems, to do anything except stand still. Certainly too busy to go and look for her grandson. I wait for further instructions, but sadly the game doesn’t say if I can ‘touch the Sim to instill a sense of responsibility and constructive effort’. So, I haul myself off to where on the map the grandson is, play a mini-game (mini-task, really) to get him to come to his senses and Whoop! He hadn’t realised how worried she was. He’s going to head straight back. Except, in what I’m beginning to understand is a family trait, he’s going to accomplish that by standing rooted to the spot. I check his status screen. He’s ‘heading quietly back to the mayor’s home’, the game assures me. More imperceptibly than quietly, it would seem.

Not to worry. Back to the lady mayor’s house to explain that she can relax, I’ve found the lost boy, but he’s lost the use of his legs. However, in the course of his adventure he’s clearly gained miraculous replacement powers of locomotion because as I enter the house - pling! I see on the map that he’s teleported straight home at the last minute. Quick work - almost as impressive as how effectively the game entirely de-valued the point of me going to get him. Is there a quicker way for a game to strip away all that boring, colourful, appealing game-world stuff and reveal its core mechanics in all their ugly, empty, manipulative glory?

And then there’s a flower-planting task - how could there not be? But instead of giving me any creative input, or any sense of customisation or ownership of the world, the game gives me a pocketful of identical red tulips and demands I place them in pre-ordained flower beds. Fine. I do eight, get bored, return to the quest giver. No dice. I’ve got to put them in ALL the spaces in ALL the flower beds. Fine. Back to the flower beds. Not fine. There are 14 spaces and only 10 slots in my inventory, so I’ve run out. Now I understand why the flower-lady said I could come back for more ‘if I ran out.’ Although I don’t quite understand why she didn’t say ‘when I ran out’, since the game had made that an inevitability. But fine. Back to her, and back to the flower beds. At least, I think, I’ll end up with 6 bonus tulips. I return for my pat on the head, and she takes the spare tulips off me. Not fine.

And on it goes. Three screens of repeated dialogue to get into each shop. Shops that dump you out of the whole process if you decide you’ve picked the wrong category. Mini-games that don’t have a retry option. Characters who you trek across the world to find, and who then teleport when you’re six feet away, because the clock trips from day to night and they’re supposed to be home. The game itself, when you get to it, might be brilliant. But why make it so hard to get to it? Why have an otherwise functioning, appealing game riddled with so many tiny, cheap, fixable hiccups?

Five minutes in, and I take it all back. MySims is radically, daringly unique. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a game where every single interaction I’ve encountered from game start to first save is so needlessly flawed. Maybe instead of Animal Crossing, EA should have cribbed a bit harder from The 400.