Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/1138
40 summer 2009 40 summer 2009 40 40 surFDADDY OrCA W ith your shield gun pointing at the building ahead of you and your biorifle in your holster, you see heavily armored, well-muscled computer game characters running at you. They're coming at you in squads with team names like Thunder Crash, Iron Guard, and Fire storm. Your mission? Obliterate your opponents and claim the unreal Tournament Trophy. But, who exactly — or what — is that large pixilated dude coming after you in the camouflaged flak jacket? epic Games' unreal Tournament 2004 is a multiplayer FPs (First Person shooter) PC game that "combines the kill-or-be-killed experience of gladiatorial combat with cutting-edge technology." users compete in "death match" teams over the Internet for a prized Tournament Trophy. Although there has been very little research into the psychological and social aspects of FPs games, existing studies show the players are almost exclusively young men (mean age about 18 years) who spend a lot of their leisure time on gaming (about 2.6 hours per day). But young men are not the only players. Gamebots (as opposed to Internet bots or web robots) are a type of weak AI expert system software used to simulate human behavior in computer games such as unreal Tournament and its ilk: World of Image courtesy of Epic Games