Towards General RPG Playing

Abstract

General videogame playing has come a long way in a short period of time, but remains at the level of solving relatively short games made up of distinct and isolated episodes. Even simple console role-playing games (RPGs) are far beyond the reach of current techniques, requiring the synthesis of cultural knowledge with compositional reasoning over several interconnected sub-games. We explore how the challenges of playing these games could spark new advances in compositional analysis of games and common-sense reasoning. General RPG playing can leverage advances in episodic general game playing and in areas like text understanding, image classification, and automated game design learning. It has direct applications in design support and AI-based game design, and the techniques used to enable it could generalize to other families of games such as adventure, open-world, and simulation games. In this paper, we describe the motivation behind general RPG playing in a sub-domain of Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) RPGs, some promising approaches to some of its fundamental issues, and immediate next steps; we conclude by describing a few concrete benchmark problems on the path towards automated play of these complex games.