Summary

This chapter covered the background behind emotions from many different perspectives, and the information provided here will help us develop emotional systems in the rest of this part:

• In evolutionary terms, emotions increase the likelihood of survival by providing instinctive reactions and high-level biases for behaviors.

• Biologically inspired emotional systems generally combine an adaptive component with a fixed emotion component.

• Emotions are a small part of human intelligence, although they serve their purpose like other abilities.

• The main purpose of artificial emotions is to improve the interaction with humans.

• Games can benefit from emotions because the emotions improve believability and realism.

With the purpose of artificial emotions now obvious, we can take a game developer's approach to the problem in the next chapter.

Practical Demo Sensitiv is a combination of previous capabilities and behaviors, each triggering simple emotional reactions. Sensitiv is not affected by these emotions, but keeps track of them by logging them to the debugging console. These primitive sensations are explained further and taken into account in the next chapter.