Group items tagged

questioning dominant paradigms in video game narrative and design and studies

Excerpt from the 2011 book by Harold Goldberg, All Your Base Are Belong to Us, arguing about the potential for video games, how some scenes in games are executed better than in wel-known films, and showing how movies and pop music were not considered culturally serious until they were, and that the same future exists for games, with the potential coming from such advances in 3D technology or holography.

Abstract: "D video games are getting popular in the world with the availability of advanced graphic cards, high processing p ower computers, high speed internet and smart sensing devices ranging from general mouse to Microsoft Kinect. OpenGL is a popular graphics processing framework and it is being used by many famous 3D video game design software as the back end framework. In this paper we present our experience with OpenGL based C++ implementation of a 3D first person shooting game. 3D environment building, navigating, character animation, lighting, sound and shooting is described. Specially OpenGL based concepts are discussed for clear understanding of the concepts."

From the abstract: "Collective Artificial Intelligence (CAI) simulates human intelligence from data contributed by many humans, mined for inter-related patterns. This thesis applies CAI to social role-playing, introducing an end-to-end process for compositing recorded performances from thousands of humans, and simulating open-ended interaction from this data. The CAI process combines crowdsourcing, pattern discovery, and case-based planning. Content creation is crowdsourced by recording role-players online. Browser-based tools allow non-experts to annotate data, organizing content into a hierarchical narrative structure. Patterns discovered from data power a novel system combining plan recognition with case-based planning. The combination of this process and structure produces a new medium, which exploits a massive corpus to realize characters who interact and converse with humans. This medium enables new experiences in videogames, and new classes of training simulations, therapeutic applications, and social robots. .... As a proof of concept, a CAI system has been evaluated by recording over 10,000 performances in The Restaurant Game, automating an AI-controlled waitress who interacts in the world, and converses with a human via text or speech. Quantitative results demonstrate CAI supports significantly open-ended interaction with humans, while focus groups reveal factors for improving engagement."

Abstract: "Procedural generation of games has become an active re- search eld. We present a system that automatically gen- erates an interactive ction (IF) by learning from crowd- sourced corpora of example stories. We ask crowd workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk to write short stories about a given situation with simple language, from which a plot graph is learned, containing plot events, temporal prece- dence and mutual exclusion relations between the events. The plot graph describes an IF where players and non-player characters choose from executable events as determined by the plot graph. We demonstrate an IF learned from the domain of bank robbery"

Aspects of game design that contribute to players' romantic feelings for characters

Method for generating avatar with input from the game player, patent awarded to Lyle Corporate Development

Feminist critique of representation of female game characters and gamers

a site created to offset female representation in action video games which depicts women fighters in outfits "in which they'd be easily killed"

Abstract: "The aim of this paper is to address imaginative experiences of emotions by drawing Kendall Walton's theory of make-believe. Moreover, we use a design case as means for investigating how a child's felt emotions towards a hospital situation relates to his or her imaginative experiences of emotions towards a !ctive character in a computer game simulating the real-world situation. In so doing, we contribute with new insights to existing theories of emotions in design, which tend to focus narrowly on felt and measurable emotions."

"Create the Gotham for your Batman, the African savannah for your Simba, or the bustling newsroom for your Clark Kent. Background, setting, environment...whatever you call it, it is the silent character in the visual story, and a dynamic and compelling setting can define and hone the action and drama of your story."

"Training was accomplished using a videogame paradigm that emphasizes associations among sound categories, visual information, and players' responses to videogame characters"