Cyberspace Game Show Hosts: Agents for Socialization, Not Just Entertainment

As the Internet has grown in size and popularity, the Internet medium has changed from an educational and technical content to a social and entertainment content. The Lycos search service estimates that the number of WWW pages has grown from 5 million to 6.89 million pages during the months of April to June of 1995, and will reach 10 million pages by 1996. A large number of these pages are devoted to personal pages, whereas only a few years ago personal pages were nonexistent. Similarly, the EFnet Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers have grown from supporting several hundred concurrent users in 1991 to over 20,000 concurrent users in 1996. Both the WWW and IRC are becoming active vehicles of socialization and entertainment. This paper focuses on the technical and social aspects of a set of games designed by the authors that run on IRC, and how AI techniques can augment hese games. In particular, we examine the game Risky Business, an online trivia game hosted by a computer program or "bot," short for robot. In addition to providing entertainment, the computer game show host also supports a unique setting that real-life game show hosts never encounter: the opportunity to interact in real-time with thousands of players, 24 hours a day, and become a cornerstone of their social interaction in cyberspace. Background Information IRC is composed of client programs connected to a network of servers that facilitate textual conferencing. Similar to a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), (Mauldin, 1994) users are able to "talk" to other groups of online users interactively in real-time. However, instead of the MUD’s physical metaphor of rooms and locations, IRC users communicate within "channels" that typically cover a specific topic (such as unix, sex, or chocolate). As with virtual worlds where users take on the persona of their avatars, in the IRC world users take on a new persona or emphasize part of their existing persona or interests, as specified through their nickname. Because IRC is more textually based, it may be that there is less room for the created fantasy personalities purported to typify graphical multi-user environments as specified through their nickname. Within the domain of IRC, we have created several challenging trivia games. The focus of this paper is the game "Risky Business" (or RiskyBus) which is Jeopardy! TM style trivia game in which users attempt to be the first to answer trivia questions in order to win virtual money and virtual prizes (Qnittner, 1995; Sandberg, 1994). The game is hosted by a computer agent or "bot" programmed in C that communicates with IRC servers just like a human client. On EFnet servers, the host is named "RobBot" and on Qnet servers, the hostess is named "ReneeBot." In order to host the games, the bots require knowledge regarding IRC commands, knowledge regarding how the game is played, rules and etiquette to maintain the channel, and knowledge for self-preservation within the IRC environment. In the event that the bot makes an error, human operators are capable of correcting the game. The bot also records individual player statistics such as the number of games won, and the high scores. In addition to this knowledge, the bots also project distinct personalities through ELIZA-like responses to user input (Weizenbaum, 1965). This knowledge must currently input by a human operator. A popular type of reply are witty or humorous tatements about a specific player’s interests. A sample of a game being played through RobBot’s is shown below: Current category: Footwear. Question Value: 800. Question 5 of 30: Low cut woman’s hoe or a device to pass gasoline rob pump rob pump brandex: That is CORRECT! You win 800. Your total is -300. Please wait while preparing the next Gullivers Travels question... brand rocks! Current category: GuUivers Travels. Question Value: 400. 12 From: AAAI Technical Report WS-96-03. Compilation copyright © 1996, AAAI (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. Category Comment: Trivia about Gullivers Travels Question 6 of 30: The only thing the Laputian king wanted to learn about the outside world oh this one sux what food do you like rob Pass the ho-ho’s! * MastrLion passes out (much to the relief of the channel no doubt) rob mathematics rob tug mastrlion: Bzztf That is incorrect. You lose 400. Your total is -500. mach: That is CORRECT! You win 400. Your total is 400. RobBot recognizes text prefaced by "Rob" as input relating to the game. In most cases, the input data constitutes commands or a player’s answer to a trivia question. However, the bot may also respond to text which is not a command, as in the example where "Mach" comments about food, and the bot replies regarding ho-ho’s. These replies give RobBot a personality perhaps one as a junkfood addict. Note that while the game proceeds, users are also socializing with each other; Texmex comments about how he dislikes the current category, while jennew praises BrandEx for answering a question correctly.