Towards Social Facilitation in Audience Participation Games: Fighting Game AIs whose Strength Depends on Audience Responses

This paper presents two AIs that enable a fighting game to be played or live-streamed as an audience participation game. The proposed fighting game AIs imitates a social facilitation in human psychology by dynamically adjusting its strength based on audience responses during gameplay. The two AIs exploit Monte-Carlo Tree Search. They have three important mechanisms, for dynamic difficulty adjustment, human-like behavior promotion, and social facilitation integration. We developed the two AIs with different evaluation functions. The common feature is an integrated social facilitation parameter. However, the difference is that one AI is developed by generalizing an existing AI by simply adding a parameter for setting the targeted HP difference, whereas the other was particularly designed for an social facilitation by a strict control of damage score difference. Our experiment result shows that the former one yields more human-like behavior, while the latter one yields slightly better strength adjustment.