Fear Like a Disease: Applying Epidemiology Models to Crowd Simulations in Games

This post was originally the research paper portion of my graduate capstone project. Since it's relatively long I'm also offering it as a PDF here.

1      Abstract

In many games, crowd simulations are not usually as dynamic as real crowds. By applying an epidemiologic system to the crowd model we can make it more interesting. When the “fear” attribute of an AI character in the game Remote Shepherd was treated as a transmissible virus the crowd did, in fact, become more dynamic and difficult to predict. Future extensions of this work may involve applying a similar system to AI control structures or to social phenomena other than crowds.