Modelling Player Understanding of Non-Player Character Paths

Abstract

Modelling a player's understanding of NPC movements can be useful for adapting gameplay to different play styles. For stealth games, what a player knows or suspects of enemy movements is important to how they will navigate towards a solution. In this work, we build a uniform abstraction of potential player path knowledge based on their partial observations. We use this representation to compute different path estimates according to different player expectations. We augment our work with a user study that validates what kinds of NPC behaviour a player may expect, and develop a tool that can build and explore appropriate (expected) paths. We find that players prefer short simple paths over long or complex paths with looping or backtracking behaviour.