UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM presents "Intrinsic Motivation in Video Games: From Steering Character Behaviour to Evaluating Game Content" Christian Guckelsberger (Goldsmiths, University of London) 14 November 2018 (Wednesday) 1 - 2 pm Hatfield, College Lane Campus Seminar Room C152 Everyone is Welcome to Attend Refreshments will be available Abstract: Being intrinsically motivated means engaging in an activity for its inherent satisfactions, rather than for some separable consequence. People may play an open world game because they enjoy exploration, not because they aim for a prize as in an e-sports competition. Formal models of intrinsic motivation allow us to endow artificial agents with drives such as curiosity or learning progress. In this talk, I describe how these kinds of models address major challenges in both academic games research and practical games development. I present two studies based on empowerment, one specific model of intrinsic motivation, which quantifies an agent's potential and perceivable influence. I show how empowerment can be used to create flexible and adaptive general non-player characters, and to predict players' experience of procedurally generated content without a person in the loop. --------------------------------------------------- Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium http://cs-colloq.cs.herts.ac.uk