Nice article about 'self-conscious' machines: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/314/5802/1118. Often player complain that games only allow the player to play the game within it's narrowly defined limits ('linearity'). Machines (or NPC models) that do not only react to changes in the environment but also to changes in their morphology would make a nice feature to enhance gameplay. Of course the computational costs associated with modeling self-awareness and the poor performance of the described algorithm do not allow to use it in current games, but I wonder how long it will take or if there are any efforts to implement such things in a game. If one would just run a model and map the explorative behaviour onto a finite-state machine it should be possible to simulate this behavior within a wide range of possible circumstances without having to pay the large computational costs (but having to deal with a large number of states). Would be fun to see this realized ...