Hybrid Voting-Based Task Assignment in Role-Playing Games

TL;DR

This paper presents VBTA, a novel framework that combines voting methods, LLMs, and path planning to improve task assignment in RPGs, enhancing agent performance and game immersion.

Contribution

Introduces Voting-Based Task Assignment (VBTA), integrating voting, LLMs, and conflict-based search for effective agent-task matching in role-playing games.

Findings

VBTA effectively assigns suitable agents to tasks using voting methods.

The framework supports generating diverse combat encounters and narratives.

VBTA improves task allocation robustness in complex game scenarios.

Abstract

In role-playing games (RPGs), the level of immersion is critical-especially when an in-game agent conveys tasks, hints, or ideas to the player. For an agent to accurately interpret the player's emotional state and contextual nuances, a foundational level of understanding is required, which can be achieved using a Large Language Model (LLM). Maintaining the LLM's focus across multiple context changes, however, necessitates a more robust approach, such as integrating the LLM with a dedicated task allocation model to guide its performance throughout gameplay. In response to this need, we introduce Voting-Based Task Assignment (VBTA), a framework inspired by human reasoning in task allocation and completion. VBTA assigns capability profiles to agents and task descriptions to tasks, then generates a suitability matrix that quantifies the alignment between an agent's abilities and a task's requirements. Leveraging six distinct voting methods, a pre-trained LLM, and integrating conflict-based search (CBS) for path planning, VBTA efficiently identifies and assigns the most suitable agent to each task. While existing approaches focus on generating individual aspects of gameplay, such as single quests, or combat encounters, our method shows promise when generating both unique combat encounters and narratives because of its generalizable nature.