Ethan Kennerly

According to an experiment on a bird called a budgerigar, the bird finds it easier to learn by imitation than by ignoring observed behavior of another bird. Automatic imitation has been accepted in humans, but the authors claim this is the first evidence of automatic imitation in birds.

This suggests to me that many tasks can be learned by observing others perform the same. In my thesis, I had been presenting behavior to imitate, so that users could begin to pick up elements of a foreign language without verbal instruction. The technique prompted me to look for exemplary cases of priming player behavior through imitation in videogames.

Last week while I was playing Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (PS3), I arrived where my plane had crashed. From the overlooking cliff, I noticed one of the thugs, in the distance, sliding down a rope. It struck me as an odd way to set the scene of the thug's camp. After I wiped them out (actually I didn't want to kill these anonymous brown-skinned fellows, but that's the only way the game taught me to progress the plot), I was stumped on how to trigger the next encounter or cutscene. Then I saw the rope. With little thought, I climbed. I had imitated the distant rope climber. Through storytelling and animation, my behavior was artfully directed to discover the next scene's trigger volume. And rather than distract me, as most hints in games do (including the L2 button in Uncharted), this subtle display of a behavior to imitate suggested a solution without breaking my belief in the narrative.