Humans vs Bots: Thought Experiment

I was wondering if some KAG players would contribute a few minutes of their time to try a quick thought experiment and post their insights?

Im doing gaming research at York Uni in England. Atm I’m researching Social Presence, the social connection we feel with others through virtual environments, such as online games and multi-user simulations. I play a bit of KAG and think its a really interesting collaborative/ competitive game, it is both low fidelity, yet complex.

The thought experiment I’d like you to try is this:

So I’m currently looking into abiguity within virtual environments and one interesting part of virtual environments is how we feel towards humans vs bots. How would you feel if there was a KAG server, in which there were humans and bots but you did not know which were humans and which were not?

To ensure ambiguity lets assume all the entities on the server had standardized names, did not communicate verbally/textually and all Bots would be given a ping score, etc.

1. In terms of Social presence, would you feel feel more/less socially connected to the other players?

2. In terms of immersion, would the ambiguity make the game less immersive than normal?

Personally I would expect players to attempt to figure out which entities are bots and which are humans by some cunning means. What do you think? Do people treat all entities as humans if they know that some definitely are? Or do people treat all entities as bots if they know that some are?

Next time you play, perhaps think about ‘what if some of these guys are bots’?

cheers guys

 

Both one and two would be less. One of the best part of the game is talking to all the different people!

Of course most of us would try to figure it out. And in games, in this one especially, there are tells between bots and players so it wouldn't be too hard.

Since there would be no verbal connections, there wouldn't be a difference between bots and players, besides skill levels, I would probably just treat everyone as a bot.

 

Agreed. Especially if we wouldn't be allowed to spam "For the King!" That's a big part of the immersion for me.
However, I think it would be quite easy to tell a human from a bot with KAG's AI. Bots have a pretty predictable behavior. But still, less to both.

 

Ok but lets assume for the experiment that the Bot behaviour is improved to a point which makes it tricky to tell between a Bot and a player who isnt great.

 

In that case, it would probably feel like everyone was a bot, like jerloch said. I most likely wouldn't play anymore, honestly.

 

I'm pretty sure tehre have been a few games like this. There was one where one player is in a party and another is a sniper looking through the window. The sniper tried to figure out who was the player, and the player tried to blend in and not get shot.

Anyways I don't think this would work in KAG. Even though pubs are very dumb the AI is a different kind of dumb.

 

I personally love the bots in kag, they may be imbeciles but just how they smile and then charge towards then enemy. In fact i often smile back at them.

 

cool what department are they in? and Very useful thanks!

yeah a stand alone, just a one off where everybody goes in getting a new handle/name to make sure its ambiguous.

About the immersion aspect, so in multilayer games the chance that some of the other entities might be bots reduces immersion for you? But in a single player you can allow your self to become attached (in a humours way) to these little robots?

p.s. fixed the bold, i have no idea either >.<

Yeah of course there could be some simple script for bots to use emotes, reminds me of the old UT games where the bots used to make their action movie-esque one liners after killing each other. However this raises an interesting issue about trying to make bot communication realistic, or at least not so terrible that it breaks immersion.

MMOs? that would be far too easy :)
I get what you are saying but thats not my line of research. The thing is MMOs are all about social presence, we go there to be social, I am looking at social presence in games that do not have it as their goal, games where the social presence is emergent. Like team based FPS games, KAG, etc. I'm also looking into games that are conceptually similar to multi-user simulations, used to train people, and MMOs arnt very useful for this.

Thanks for the replies so far

 

The bots would have the voice of Mr. Bean therefore ruining the entire thing.

 

LOL, I'd post a thread to tell people to jump a lot on the spot so everyone knows who is and who isn't. :) So you'd see lots of people jumping up and down and the rest charging into battle. Also, I've never seen a bot use the shield parachute thing.

 

Actually this is more or less exactly what happened in TF2, as text speech on most servers was minimal and servers began the practice of given the bots "leet" names and assigning them a ping. The only way you could tell was by popping the scoreboard open and noting that the bots didn't have a display picture, although they have probably changed even that now.

The practice is very damaging to gameplay, mostly because bots can rarely be programmed to be even as competent as the weakest human players. Either that or they play entirely unrealistically (see the bots from Counter-Strike: Source, the hardest of which are basically infallible aimbots). If you have played the game for a decent length of time it's usually quite easy to tell the bots from the humans by watching them for a bit.

The human factor is very important, although I think in the absence of actual human players gamers will personify certain bots, mark some out as rivals etc. I certainly noticed this when I played Timesplitters back in the day. Part of the joy of online gaming is making friends and enemies, and the thrill of nailing a nemesis with a headshot or well thrown bomb is unparalleled in that regard. Humans always have a capacity to surprise you, whereas bots follow predictable patterns.

If you had the time and inclination you could set up a blind test using a game with some good bots.

 

Only the migrants have the mister bean voice, not bots. Also, migrants are only in zombie mode.

 

I love the bots. Don't know why, I feel they got some kind of personnality, even they are predicatble.

I don't know how I will consider others, if there is bots and humans. It could be nice to try this.

EDIT : Why is there Shad at the end of my post ?

EDIT : April fool?

 

its actually pretty easy to tell if a person is a bot or a human, To try to chat with them to see if they sound normal ask what country there in and so on...
And if they tell you information and they talk like a normal human being then there human.

 

Yeah, but if we only use emote... and no chat... just see if they can climb on a team ladderbridge. If they can't, they are bots ! Or really stoopid noobz.

 

Like Regidit said, when you're more than a "casual" player, you can tell in a matter of seconds, who is a bot and who is not, if you played the game a bit. So you can't consider them as "normal" players, because the more you play, the more you can predict what they will or will not do. Maybe as AI get better and better, this will change. For now, bot is bot, it's better than no player sometimes in some games, for like, 5 minutes.