AI Showrunner – Managing Gameplay Experience with a Hierarchical Network of AI Directors

The artificial intelligence (AI) Director design paradigm for tailoring player gameplay experience has been successfully applied in several commercial video games to date. Most of them used a single director with a limited control scope, whose deployment was secondary to that of other gameplay systems. However, positioning a hierarchical network of AI Directors at the centre of the gameplay architecture early in production provides opportunities for a structured and segmented procedural experience management with precise design intent embedding. It enables holistic, systemic adjustment of player experience, as well as control over of gameplay and story pacing at different levels of a game’s context. The relevance of this approach is discussed with respect to its successful application in two released, commercial projects developed at Robot Gentleman.