Reasoning with Ontologies for Non-Player Character Decisions in Games

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for Non-Player Character (NPC) decision-making based on logical reasoning with ontologies are almost absent from the academic and industrial game literature. We propose to take advantage of the high expressiveness of rule-based systems and their planning potential with backward chaining on an inference engine to develop more sophisticated action plans. We believe that logic programming, successfully used in other fields, with the addition of the Well-Founded Semantics (WFS) as well as the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) framework, could improve the sometimes insufficient credibility of the NPCs and their reasoning capabilities.