Alex Murov - Belief-Desire-Intention in serious game

afstudeercolloquium

Serious games are becoming more and more acknowledged to have educational and practical advantages in comparison to more traditional training methods. The Royal Netherlands Army (RNLA) has recognized these gains before time, and have been employing different kinds of serious games in their training programs. The main target group for such training is military personal which is involved in tactical and psychological decision process. RNLA, together with research institute TNO Defence, Security & Safety, have been developing various serious games for training and mission evaluation purposes. Main goal of this research is to decouple the decision making process of the Non-Playing Characters (NPC’s) from the game engine and incorporate this process into existing logical framework of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI). To realise the separation of the game world, where characters were living, and the BDI framework, where decisions were made, a concept of Tactical-Bot (TacBot) has been introduces. TacBot gave an opportunity to introduce extra abstraction level where game engine output was abstracted to folk-psychological kind of concepts. Freeing the decision making process from the game engine and placing it into a separate object made it to be reusable in merely any type of serious game by adding game specific abstractions to the TacBot layer and adding new translations to the BDI framework. This all without changing integrity of the game itself.