Jeff Orkin & Deb Roy
MIT Media Lab | Cognitive Machines
http://www.media.mit.edu/~jorkin
http://www.media.mit.edu/~dkroy

                          Become a Fan of The Restaurant Game             

This game was created with Torque v1.5 from GarageGames.

Watch the Gameplay Video on YouTube.


Download The Restaurant Game Here:

Windows XP/2000: theRestaurant.msi v1.9.1 (30MB) - posted 05/24/07

Mac OSX (Universal): theRestaurant-v1.9.1.zip (33MB) - posted 05/24/07

Players must be 18 or over.

Please email me at   with any problems, or see our System Requirements and Troubleshooting page.

The Restaurant Game

Contribute to the first collaboratively authored computer game and earn Game Designer credit!

The Restaurant Game is a research project at the MIT Media Lab that will algorithmically combine the gameplay experiences of thousands of players to create a new game. In a few months, we will apply machine learning algorithms to data collected through the multiplayer Restaurant Game, and produce a new single-player game that we will enter into the 2008 Independent Games Festival. Everyone who plays The Restaurant Game will be credited as a Game Designer. It's never been easier to earn Game Designer credentials!

All contributions are not equal, however. Designers will be ranked based on how well they play their assigned roles, and accomplish their objectives. There will be only one Lead Designer. Remaining credits will be divided into Game Designers and Assistant Game Designers, and within each category individuals will be ranked according to the quality of their performance(s). Quality will be determined computationally, based on a number of factors.

The Restaurant Game takes about 10 minutes to play. It is a two-player game that will automatically find partners for players once you join a server. You are welcome encouraged to play multiple times. In order for this project to be at all successful, we will need to collect a lot of data -- data from over 1,000 10,000 gameplay sessions. Play early, play often, and please spread the word!

This project attempts to address two frustrations I experienced as a professional game developer. 1) Convincing human social behavior is difficult to model with existing hand crafted AI systems. 2) Play testing by people outside of the development team typically comes too late to have a major impact on the final product. This experiment aims to generate AI behaviors that conform to the way players actually choose to interact with other characters and the environment; behaviors that are convincingly human because they capture the nuances of real human behavior and language.

Please email me at   with questions or technical problems.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION!

     

8,588 games played as of 11/17/08.

After capturing over 1,000 games in the first two weeks, we have raised our goal to 10,000 games.

Related Publications:            

Jeff Orkin and Deb Roy. (2007) The Restaurant Game: Learning Social Behavior and Language from Thousands of Players Online. Journal of Game Development, 3(1), 39-60.

Jeff Orkin. (2007) Learning Plan Networks in Conversational Video Games. Masters Thesis, MIT Media Lab.

Related Press:                   

IEEE Intelligent Systems: Toward More Human Video Game Characters
Boston Globe: Decisions, decisions
SEED: One-to-One (in The Design Issue)
NPR Talk of the Nation: Science Friday: Go Get a (Virtual) Life. (Click Listen for audio)
Boston Globe: Game designers test the limits of artificial intelligence
Ars Technica: MIT's behavioral analysis game comes to Intel Macs
New Scientist: Virtual dining provides tips for cyber characters
Garage Games: Human Players Being Tapped to Enhance Artificial Intelligence
PC World: The Restaurant - How weird are you? Find out with this simulation, which includes a personality test
Trend Hunter Magazine: The Restaurant Game Project - Your Chance To Be A Video Game Designer
SpeedZone: The Restaurant Game - Speel ober of klant in een online restaurant
Kotaku: New Game Learns From Players, Programs New Game
The Guardian: The Restaurant: A game development conversation
Inside Mac Games: MIT Takes You Out to The Restaurant Game
Evil Avatar: The Restaurant - Game Designers Wanted
IGN's Voodoo Extreme: MIT's The Restaurant Game
Game Tycoon: Restaurant Game
Terra Nova: The future?
Grand Text Auto: Weekend Restaurant, No Reservations Required, BYOB
Game/AI: 1,000 Players Can't Be Wrong