Abstract

With the dominant trope of the computer as adversary rather than enabler, reinforcement learning for games has mainly focused on the ability of agents to compete and win. Although cooperation is a product of learning, of understanding the player’s requirements and applying agents’ competences to fulfil them, there has been little investigation of reinforcement learning for cooperation in games. Reinforcement learning results in the agent adapting and changing, however, there are concerns that such adaptivity could alienate users if their cooperative agent outperforms them. To explore this, the paper outlines the development and training of cooperative agents reporting users’ positive response to adaptive cooperation in games.