Esports Agents with a Theory of Mind: Towards Better Engagement, Education, and Engineering

TL;DR

This paper advocates for integrating a theory of mind into AI agents in esports to improve player engagement, skills, and coaching by understanding players' tactics and intentions through human-in-the-loop methods.

Contribution

It introduces a human-in-the-loop approach for embedding a theory of mind into esports AI agents, emphasizing player-centric behavioral modeling and situated cognition.

Findings

Proposes human-in-the-loop methods for theory of mind discovery.

Highlights importance of player-centric investigations.

Discusses broader implications for engineering and education.

Abstract

The role of AI in esports is shifting from leveraging games as a testbed for improving AI algorithms to addressing the needs of the esports players such as enhancing their gaming experience, esports skills, and providing coaching. For AI to be able to effectively address such needs in esports, AI agents require a theory of mind, that is, the ability to infer players' tactics and intents. To that end, in this position paper, we argue for human-in-the-loop approaches for the discovery and computational embedding of the theory of mind within behavioral models of esports players. We discuss that such approaches can be enabled by player-centric investigations on situated cognition that will expand our understanding of the cognitive and other unobservable factors that influence esports players' behaviors. We conclude by discussing the implications of such a research direction in esports as well as broader implications in engineering design and design education.