This was a beautiful and magical thing to discover. Here I am, bumbling around this new open-world game, not really caring too much about the main quest, when a white fox crosses my path. I decide to follow it and it leads me up a mountain to an ancient, mysterious shrine. With a quest in it. It was completely unintended but so rewarding, and I really hope that the next one keeps it. Because getting rewarded for acting like someone in a fairy tale is exactly what these games are for.
I think the true gem of this story is that it explains the inconsistent outcome/reason for this behavior, and hence the enduring community debate.
I.e. a fox can be leading you to a high-triangle-density area (aka treasure), or it can simply be leading you away if no treasure is about
And so players no doubt observed both of these outcomes... and hence the debate! And thus the nuances of the behavior somehow make it more magical than "fox always leads to treasure" simplicity.
This is always the case when you have probabilities in games... there will always be patterns in an individual's series of random numbers, and people will construct a narrative to explain it.
It reminds me of Onyxia in WoW, where the leading theory for a long time was that you needed Damage over time spells (DoTs) on her to prevent her from doing her damaging fire breaths, which would wipe the entire raid group.
Turns out it was just random (confirmed by a developer long after), but it is interesting the meaning that can and will be assigned to random events. Probably the same mechanism that causes myths and eventually religion to form in real life.
Funny, that. In my psychology 101 class, I was thought that random and intermittent rewards work better for conditioning behaviour than consistent rewards.
So in a way, the inconsistency might've pulled more people in.
Games like Gothic had this but scripted. Small yet densely packed maps with rewards everywhere. It's pleasant to see a truly useful application of AI and not just "gamer booster" stuff.
The linked Twitter thread has all of the information the article has and more. Do yourself a favor and just click the Twitter link they have and get on with it.
What’s interesting to me is that this result shares something with the relativistic theory of gravity:
That is, that gravity is a side-effect of the fact that time moves more slowly closer to centers of mass, which causes the velocity vector of an object moving in space to turn in the direction of the time-speed gradient in space.
This is misleading / incomplete. Curviture in the time dimension is not enough to explain gravity. Gravity is caused by curviture in spacetime (4D). It's definitely not intuitive to think about the time dimension (and so makes for a good youtube video), but this "theory" you're talking about isn't anything that wasn't already known when GR was first introduce.
I'm not sure if you just meant GR and "accounts for some of gravity", but it's a common mistake I've seen people make after some youtube videos on the subject.
Interestingly enough, foxes are connected to shrines in Japanese folklore. I've heard some people claim Ghost of Tsushima uses foxes to lead to shrines in a homage to this behavior in Skyrim, but it's really just an older cultural connection and a nice bit of kismet. :)
When I first started playing Ghost of Tsushima I just thought it was a reference to Inari foxes guarding shrines in Japanese folklore.
But since learning about the fox treasures in Skyrim (I had completely missed those theories when I first played it) I have been wondering if it's more.
I haven't heard of foxes leading you to their shrine before, only guarding it and acting as messengers to the divine. So this American game with foxes leading you to inari shrines feels to me like a nod to Skyrim nicely incorporating this Japanese folklore.
Skyrim isn't very emergent though - morrowind is moreso, but for emergent gameplay you want to look at dwarf fortress, SS13 or many roguelikes. If anything, Bethesda have been simplifying their games through the years.
In what regard is Morrowind more emergent than Skyrim?
It definitely felt magical when it was new, but I think that's just a feeling. Skyrim has Radiant AI and things like NPCs taking over establishments when the owner dies. A number of dynamic behaviors which help things feel a bit more alive.
I can't remember Morrowind having any kind of dynamic behavior or emergent gameplay. Unless you count being able to lock yourself out of quests by killing important characters (including as part of other quest lines!) which is something I do miss.
In what regard is Skyrim's gameplay emergent, aside from the OP link's fox example?
As I understand it, Radiant AI is a framework for fixed and relatively simple finite state machines, with states like "use the anvil at the blacksmith's shop during working hours" or "drink in the tavern at 9 PM." Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds beyond the NPC AI found in earlier games, but it's far from the emergent craziness you'll see in a sandbox game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Dynamic behaviors like the one you mentioned are still all essentially scripted interactions. Dialogue, the core interaction between the player and most NPCs, is still 100% scripted conversation trees. The most interesting emergent events I remember from Skyrim (or Oblivion) were funny glitches like this one:
I'd also like to hear the GP commentor's reply re: emergent gameplay in Morrowind. I haven't played that game as much as the others, and don't have enough in-game experience to comment.
I would not call any behavior in Skyrim emergent either, hence my use of the word "dynamic". I am a big fan of Dwarf Fortress, in fact I spent most of today so far playing it with my son, so I know the difference.
But when most people say emergent it is often simply dynamic systems or context sensitive scripts they mean, so I assumed that was likely what they meant.
Skyrim has a number of these: NPCs you've charmed can leave you inheritance if they die, inns and shops can change owners in similar fashion, some scripted events like towns being captured in the civil war cause officials to be killed or exiled and replaced, ...
I wanted to know if there was more of that type of dynamic world behaviour to Morrowind than I could remember.
Npcs taking over shops isn't really emergent because that behaviour is programmed intentionally. Neither is breaking the quest chains in morrowind unless it's done by an AI (which can happen sparingly but the later games had much more active Npcs). Its more about how different rules and systems can interact with each other to create unexpected and novel results, and morrowind simply had more emergence-friendly mechanics like spell building, levitate, jump, and chameleon, more alchemical potions, double edged items like boots of blinding speed and icarian flight. Probably more things I can't remember but I was distinctly disappointed with the lack of exploitable mechanics in skyrim.
I agree none of the behavior in any Elder Scrolls game really qualify as emergent. Hence why I used the word dynamic as I thought what you were referring to was a feeling of the game world being alive.
If you're referring to magic items having both positive and negative effects and having to find workarounds then it sounds like you're talking about basic synergy rather than emergent properties.
I do agree that it's a shame they've removed spell crafting and made some things more clearly positive or negative. But I must say I don't mind how ridiculously unbalanced magic was in Morrowind.
The interactions between the magic design and alchemical systems can be emergent, but you're right that the cancelling of the negative effects of the OP items could be called synergistic instead - I think it depends on whether the effects were intended to be cancelled or not, which I don't think they necessarily were given the ones I mentioned were both introduced as jokes and items that are OP with a significant negative effect are usually coded as cursed or xeno-objects, and afforded a high status rather than being granted by random passers-by.
Just want to make sure if I correctly understand what it means by "triangle": For navigation, the developer triangularize the skyrim world, and these divided triangles are not the same size - for example, a 100-sq feet field is covered by one triangle, while a 100-sq feet point of interest is more complicated and covered by more triangles. The original design intention is that the number of triangles encodes the sense of distance, but maximizing the #triangles actually leads to interesting places.
Right. Another way to think about it is if you reproject the Skyrim map so that each navmesh tri is equally big, a surprisingly large area would be taken up by points of interest, and foxes target a random point in a radius around the current point in that reprojected map.
> The original design intention is that the number of triangles encodes the sense of distance, but maximizing the #triangles actually leads to interesting places.
The design intention was saving resources.
The game probably streams the nav.mesh along with map tiles; the cost is disk I/O and RAM. Once the nav.mesh is in RAM, the game runs raycasts or A* search or whatever, the cost is CPU time. In a big flat nothing, NPCs can walk any direction they want without colliding into things, having a dense nav.mesh at that place would be a waste of resources.
The fox AI doesn’t quite maximize anything. It does something similar to random walk over nav.mesh triangles. After long enough time, random walk algorithm causes the fox to be randomly distributed over nav.mesh triangles, i.e. probability to be in any particular nav.mesh triangle is about the same. However, because nav.mesh triangles have very uneven area, the fox distribution over space is very uneven too. The fox is way more likely to be in places with dense nav.mesh because that’s where the majority of nav.mesh triangles are.
The title is elusive; that doesn't make it an emergent behavior, with the term AI, implying some sort of intelligence.
The fox is programmed to run away from the player, very simple state machine. It happens to navigate the navmesh like the player and eventually will end up leading places the player didn't think of going containing secrets.
It's not emerging intelligence as much as it is murphy's law.
I think they are using AI in gaming terms, not literally AI. I hear NPC behavior in games being called AI since… more or less ever.
Your second paragraph is not totally correct though and that’s actually what the article is about. It explains how “run away” is implemented and why this implementation leads foxes to interesting places more often than you would expect by simply running around.
BTW what do you mean by “navigate the navmesh like the player”? The player is unaware of the navmesh, am I reading your comment wrong?
Video game AI is a decades old context and has lots of it's own nomenclature for things. Emergent behavior in the context of video game AI is just when the behavior or states of various characters/objects interact in such a way that new, unprogrammed things occur. I would say this falls into that category, albeit loosely.
Another example of emergent behavior in game AI would be if you had a police NPC and a regular NPC, and the police NPC will chase any character entity if they have stolen goods on them. As the player, you could place a stolen good on a regular NPC and the police would chase them. The developers didn't anticipate that behavior, it just emerged from the interactions between various states and abilities that they did program.
Games have conserved (or re-invented, not sure) the older notions of AI, where even algorithms like A* were discovered by and considered part of the AI "movement".
Wouldn't it only cause the fox to stop at treasure areas rather than run towards such areas? Still, overall it looks like the fox leads you to stuff, but I'm just trying to understand.
“The fox isn't trying to get 100 meters away - it's trying to get 100 triangles away.”
When escaping, if they get nearby a “dense” zone, their behavior makes them run towards it since there are more triangles to hop to and it makes them “feel like” they are farther away from you, instead they will keep running around in the same “dense” area.
Well… maybe I could’ve explained it better but yeah, it’s more or less like this.
Personally, if I was being chased by someone/something, the last thing I would do is run across an open field. Instead, I'd seek a more complex environment.
You made me think that young children do something like that too. When running away/playing they try to maximize the cost/effort of running away, not actual distance.
Like: zigzagging, passing under chairs or tables, climbing on something just to immediately climbing off. The problem is they usually maximize their effort, not yours in following them.
I recently downloaded skyrim and played for the first time, yes I'm quite late to it, but considering the hype of the game I was massively disappointed. The combat and manoeuvring was truly awful. People will say, ah yes but the story, the lore! But if I wanted that I'd read a book.
After playing for a while I decided to try red dead 2 and can say that that game is so, so much better than skyrim imho.
I have never heard anyone particularly praise Skyrim's story, and rarely even the lore.
What I think people usually like about it is the mix - magical world, graphics, decently weighty combat, big monsters, people to talk to or murder or steal from etc. It doesn't excel at any one of these, but there is also nothing else outside the series offering the same combination. Perhaps RDR2 does improve on every aspect, but the massive difference in setting will still mean that both have a place - especially for this type of exploration game.
You're comparing 2 games which were a generation of console apart and a lot of things happen between those 7-8 years.
> People will say, ah yes but the story, the lore! But if I wanted that I'd read a book.
That story and lore in the video game are exactly the reason I play video games i.e. video game can easily transport you into a world which you can see/hear/play-in instead of only imagining it in your mind. Books can never come anywhere close to that because of obvious restrictions of the medium and that was the reason, many (including me) were instantly captivated by the world of Skyrim. They successfully created a world full of atmosphere and lore along with the freedom of exploration and managed to do it excellently even compared to most of the games released now (and the thing is I also played Skyrim late in 2019, yet it is probably my 2nd or 3rd favorite game of all time).
It's unfortunate that you didn't like it, so have fun with RDR2 (which is an excellent game with arguably the best storyline and characters in any video game till date).
Depending on what you like, you may find Skyrim better or worse. Oblivion had a lot of pretty well written quests, with interesting or surprising conclusions, even if they had simplistic samey gameplay.
Skyrim is better in action gameplay, though it is still extremely simplistic and samey compared to BG 2. It's still much better in terms of feel and than Oblivion. But in terms of quests, Skyrim is much worse, with virtually all quests being simple "clear this cave of people who have wronged me", though there are a handful of exceptions.
The difference being that DF is specifically designed for emergent behaviour because it's probably the most system-driven game in existence - this fox AI feature is totally accidental.
I really love emergent gameplay and I only say this because I was rather let down by skyrim's lack of emergence compared to morrowind.
The best examples are related to the magic and alchemy systems: you can break the game in many different ways, the classic one being to use fortify intelligence potions to boost your alchemy skill and then make new fortify intelligence potions until you have effectively infinite skill and extremely valuable potions. You can also use levitation and chameleon spells to access areas or items early.
It's not a /very/ emergent game but it has more to offer than skyrim. The speedrun completes in something like 10 minutes using a variety of exploits.
I may be wrong on this but I also feel like Skyrim lacked the kinds of magical items Morrowind had that basically required you to think up clever magical hacks to make them useful eg Boots of Blinding Speed
Yeah that's true - morrowind has game breaking items like boots of blinding speed, where you need to abuse the games mechanics to make them actually useful. Same with the jumping scroll you find early on - if you just use it, you're gonna die from fall damage.
By the end of my last (vanilla) playthrough I could fly through the sky like superman at 100mph, you really can't do things like that in skyrim.
I had a levitate spell, and fortify jump + slowfall + boots of blinding speed. If I could run and jump I did, otherwise I used levitate because it was slower. Also because I was Telvanni and they really can't do without levitate!
Oh yeah haha I don't think I really used it on enemies, on my destruction mage I just levitated myself out of harm's way and used fire spells to cheese melee enemies.
Emergent behaviour is higher order behaviour that is created by interaction between rules. The rules "higher INT = better potions" and "fortify INT potion increases INT" are the rules that interact to form a positive feedback loop of infinite INT. That's emergence.
Here's the bug report where players figure out what is happening 2 comments in, if you don't want to watch a 40 minute video (I almost never watch video and find them slow and boring and regret the loss of text in the web)
Another great game with a lot of this is The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Its chemistry engine which allows "elements" (heat, wind, electricity, magnetism,...) and material properties (combustible, magnetic, metallic,...) to react without any specific scripts per item.
This leads to cases such as when I chopped down an apple tree with an enchanted fire sword. The sword made the tall grass catch fire. This created an updraft. Wood from the tree caught fire and turned into a fireplace (with a prompt to sit and wait by the fire). The apples turned into baked apples from the heat.
Spoiler / tl;dw: the cats were dying of alcohol poisoning. This was a bit surprising, since cats do not drink alcohol. What was happening instead was that they were getting covered in alcohol by walking through puddles, and then consumed the alcohol while licking themselves clean.
The bug that was eventually fixed was that a cat that walked through a spilled mug and cleaned itself shouldn't have been considered to have drunk a whole mug.
Emergent just means a more complex behavior (foxes tending to flee towards interactivity-dense areas) resulting from a simpler rule (while fox.spooked, maintain 100 triangles of distance away).
Flocking is an emergent behavior that is basically minimizing a loss function of "maintain x distance". If you implemented boid AI (birds) in skyrim and used triangle count as your metric, you'd be able to spot points of interest by the sudden increase in density of flocks. But players might extrapolate to the idea that "birds flock denser in cities". But no one programmed that behavior. It just emerged.
> Emergent just means a more complex behavior [...] resulting from a simpler rule
Emergence is more a behavior that results from the relationship between two parts of a system. The fox fleeing behavior leads you to interesting things only when coupled with the way the triangles are laid out. The two parts of the world model together bring out the emergent behavior.
Well training animals to do basic tasks is literally thousands of years old, but using this density concept probably won't fly since the real life "grid" is pretty much infinitely dense. (yes yes the Planck length is technically a limit, but that is not a concern for anything alive)
The emergence here is somewhat loose, but the two 'systems' interacting are the 'fox pathfinding system' and 'terrain meshing system'. Neither of these systems explicitly point the player towards high value locations, but together they tend to. The fox points towards high mesh density locations, and the meshing system correlates those high mesh density locations with high value.
Now, this is borderline in my book as the fox pathfinding system isn't meant to point towards high mesh density locations, that's really more of a happy bug.
I’m pretty sure the GoT foxes are based off Japanese inari myth rather than this, but it is a fun coincidence!
> Legends tell of such celestial foxes providing wisdom or service to good and pious humans as they act as mediums between the celestial and human worlds.
The title is misleading. It is not the same as the original page title,
so basically user @kjeetgill is scamming us.
I find this behaviour unethical and offencive. Please do not upvote.
Thanks for the original link! I find it so hard to read text with animated gifs right below them. I literally had to scroll the gifs off the screen to read the test. Its just too distracting and there's no stop animation option on twitter. Its just incredible how this world is made for people who have high levels of on-demand focus and there's no care for us who don't have that skill or neurotypicality.
Spooked foxes aim to be 100 "triangles" away from the player on a pathfinding mesh. Where are they likely to run into the 100th triangle? In a place with a lot of pathing points, so it'll often lead you to a camp or something interesting.
^fits in one tweet and no cookie wall minigame required
Which is funny because we have so much story telling and myth that suggests the same thing. Our hero lost somewhere follows a wild animal which brings him to food or water or treasure or shelter.
In real life, animals might also be seeking out that 100th triangle. In low density areas like fields they are super exposed to predators and the elements so if chased or watched, they'll go to places with complexity and resources. I think this is a very amusing and interesting parallel between the virtual worlds we build and the real one nature built.
Unless the fox understands the idea of distance the triangles can't be dense.
If it understands distance the idea falls apart.
One explanation might be, if the fox stops and looks around after 100 triangles or some sort of signal. When it looks around, it's more likely to be in a treasure zone.
But the fox will not go toward high density triangles, because it doesn't understand density.
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