Emergent perception and video games that listen: applying sonic virtuality for creative and intelligent NPC behaviours

‘Non-player characters (NPCs)’ can present well-crafted behaviours and evoke engaging and immersive playerexperiences but such behaviour in current NPCs is illusory and only achievable within a controlled and linear/fixed video game context. NPCs struggle greatly to portray flexible or creative behaviours within an adaptive or procedurally generated environment and this is even more apparent in their relationship with sound. This paper posits that recent theoretical developments in cognitive psychology offer significant opportunity to advance NPC-AI and proposes that an intelligence framework, based upon Sonic Virtuality and integrated within an NPC, would offer distinct advantages over current systems. To illustrate this vision, a roadmap for future work is laid out using Sonic Virtuality as the foundation for a ‘synthetic listener’; an NPC capable of responding to procedurally generated and external (player-domain) audio. As a philosophical exploration, underlying principles are considered for other perception modalities, presenting an avenue of games-AI research that, ultimately, could dramatically improve NPC- ‘humanness’ and evoke a player-immersion and presence equivalent to linear/fixed AI but in much bigger, more complex virtual worlds.