The Pole Game showcases IntelliFrosh,
an engine designed to facilitate goal-driven, behavior-based groupwork among synthetic
characters. The eighty-five frosh characters in the game learn to work as a team to form a
human pyramid, climb the greasepole and remove a Scottish tam from its top. The player can
employ more than a dozen humorous methods to stall the frosh and keep them from this goal
for as long as possible.
The IntelliFrosh engine incorporates the five features
that Dr Bruce Blumberg of the MIT Media Lab identifies as fundamental to a system for
generating synthetic characters: relevance, persistence & coherence, adaptation,
intentionality, and integration of external control. IntelliFrosh also provides the 85
autonomous characters interacting in The Pole Game’s world with the capacity
to learn and teach new methods for achieving complicated goals.
The Legend of the Greasepole’s development spanned
a period of two years and involved the work of over 50 members of the Queen’s student
community. Robert
Burke, Queen’s University Math and
Engineering Class of ’99, acted as Project Manager, Lead Programmer, and
Editor-in-Chief of the LegendWeb. He designed and implemented the IntelliFrosh system
in C++. Craig Calvert, formerly a Queen’s University
Mechanical Engineering student, acted as Artistic Director during the second year of the
project. He designed and rendered the majority of the artwork that appears in The Pole
Game.
