Planning Is the Game: Action Planning as a Design Tool and Game Mechanism

Recent development in game AI has seen action planning and its derivates being adapted for controlling agents in classical types of games, such as FPSs or RPGs. Complementary, one can seek new types of gameplay elements inspired by planning. We propose and formally define a new game "genre" called anticipation games and demonstrate that planning can be used as their key concept both at design time and run time. In an anticipation game, a human player observes a computer controlled agent or agents, tries to predict their actions and indirectly helps them to achieve their goal. The paper describes an example prototype of an anticipation game we developed. The player helps a burglar steal an artifact from a museum guarded by guard agents. The burglar has incomplete knowledge of the environment and his plan will contain pitfalls. The player has to identify these pitfalls by observing burglar's behavior and change the environment so that the burglar replans and avoids the pitfalls. The game prototype is evaluated in a small-scale human-subject study, which suggests that the anticipation game concept is promising.