Higher-Order Knowledge in Computer Games

Our main aim is to raise awareness of higher-order knowledge, i.e. knowledge about knowledge, as an issue in simulating realistic non-player characters in computer games. We motivate the importance of higher-order knowledge with arguments, as well as a few examples. We survey existing games and literature to show that this issue is currently neglected. We also refer to our earlier work to illustrate one approach to simulating higher-order reasoning, which we call “explicit knowledge programming”. Finally we describe a number of issues which arise when carrying out such an implementation, some of which go beyond the scope of the present motivation of computer gaming, and are of more general interest.