Hi Dr. Peterson,

Thank you for doing this AMA. I have a question about implementing simulated personalities in a video game. For context I’m working on a videogame set in an isolated village with a population of about 200, it is mostly action-oriented and played in the first-person perspective.

The game attempts to be a simulation of life, there is day, and night, and characters need food, water, and shelter, and can feel lonely or angry or a range of other emotions, characters utilize a decision making structure and algorithms to analyze desires and develop plans to meet them. The goal of this system is to create a living breathing society around the player which reacts to the player’s actions and decisions. Many games feature moral choices, and the consequences of those choices are most often planned and scripted by the creators, I would instead like the consequences to be the result of the game’s intelligent characters, who generally seek order, dynamically responding to the chaos of the player’s actions.

My question for you is broad: what is one aspect of human personality that would be essential to implement in my game to make the human artificial intelligence believable? Or, perhaps even more important than believable, narratively interesting?

Thank you.

One of the primary quests the player can pursue is in toppling the power structure of that village. The power structure is very traditional and patriarchal: a major theme in the game is examining both how such a structure can impose oppression upon individual thinkers who want to shake the norm, but also how such a structure can provide safety and stability for thousands of years.

To get to the meat of my question: right now I am working on an artificial intelligence system for the humans in the game.