Group items tagged

Abstract: "Video games that customize to a player's experience level and abilities have the potential to allow a broader range of players to become engaged and maintain interest as they progress in experience level. A game that uniquely customizes the player's experience could attract additional demographics to gaming, which will result in a distinct edge in marketability and potential revenue. This thesis examines a subsection of adaptive gaming systems from the perspective of identifying game factors that alter the level of difficulty. Our focus is to provide a solution useful to both research and commercial gaming communities by developing a system that simulates results offline yet can be integrated into online play. While online performance is the main goal of an adaptive system, the offline simulation provides several benefits. Offline simulation allows the elimination of insignificant factors from inclusion in the training and evolution phase of machine learning algorithms. In addition it provides commercial games with a useful tool or method for performing game balancing and level tuning. To test our approach we designed a test-bed version of the game Pac-Man. The experimental testbed alters environment variables to evaluate their effect on a set of selected response variables. Observing the results of several response variables provides the potential to represent multiple player states, though our focus is on controlling the difficulty for a player. The testbed will simulate the actions of both Pac-Man and the ghosts over a variety of different settings and strategies. The evaluation of a factor's significance and its effect size are calculated using a factorial analysis approach. This method allows the identification of factors relevant to both individual strategies, and the set of all player strategies. Finally, as a proof of concept for both the online and adaptation prospects of this method, we developed a prototype adaptive system. Utilizing the releva

"This project involves developing an action-platformer game for the Flash platform. The user controls a character who must progress through levels, while avoiding obstacles, collecting items and fighting many types of enemies. Role-playing game elements such as equipment and upgrades support user customization and varied battle strategies. Developing a successful Flash game involves several factors. Flash games must be simple to get into, yet rewarding to play in both short and long sessions. Flash games must be accessible to a wide audience; both in terms of user preferences and technical limitations. Finally, Flash games must offer something unique to stand out from the crowd, in a market where hundreds of free games are published every month. This report covers the research, design and implementation done to achieve these requirements, in terms of game mechanics, interface, level design, visual design, accessibility options, and replay value. Technical challenges include building, testing and optimizing a game engine and interface from scratch, balancing the game mechanics and difficulty, and structuring the whole development process in a way that enables easy creation of new content. In addition to game design and development, this project also deals with the business aspects of developing online games; how games generate revenue, how they are marketed and distributed, and developing trends in the consumer market. Project success in different areas has been evaluated through usability studies, user ratings and reviews, and vast quantities of usage and distribution statistics. Overall, the project has been a success in terms of user reception and generated revenue, and the final section of this report includes plans for a second game, utilizing and building upon the same game engine and mechanics."

Abstract: "Combiform is a novel digital gaming console featuring four combinable handheld controllers. It is a new and unique tangible gaming interface that stresses the importance of co-located, co-attentive social interactions among players. In particular, multiple players may freely combine and lock together their handheld game controllers, thereby creating a very flexible collective and transformable tangible interface. Combiform emphasizes social interaction through controller-to-controller contact. The platform and its 10 games introduce novel, tangible and physical co-attentive experiences that are not found in traditional co-located gaming platforms using mimetic interfaces (e.g. Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect). The project is the first game console especially designed for a new emerging digital game genre - Communal Casual Game. The new game genre captures a perspective of integrating classical folk game design approach with digital elements"

From the abstract: "Traditionally, the tasks associated with game AI revolved around non player character (NPC) behavior at dierent levels of control, varying from navigation and pathnding to decision making. Commercial-standard games developed over the last 15 years and current game productions, however, suggest that the traditional challenges of game AI have been well addressed via the use of sophisticated AI approaches, not necessarily following or inspired by advances in academic practices. The marginal penetration of traditional academic game AI methods in industrial productions has been mainly due to the lack of constructive communication between academia and industry in the early days of academic game AI, and the inability of academic game AI to propose methods that would signicantly advance existing development processes or provide scalable solutions to real world problems. Recently, however, there has been a shift of research focus as the current plethora of AI uses in games is breaking the non-player character AI tradition. A number of those alternative AI uses have already shown a signicant potential for the design of better games. This paper presents four key game AI research areas that are currently reshaping the research roadmap in the game AI eld and evidently put the game AI term under a new perspective. These game AI agship research areas include the computational modeling of player experience, the procedural generation of content, the mining of player data on massive-scale and the alternative AI research foci for enhancing NPC capabilities."

"As marketers invest more and more money into in-game brand placements, little research has tested the effects of videogame customization and controller type in relation to advertising effects, even though these factors have demonstrated importance in other areas of gaming research. Results from an experiment show that game customization significantly increases recall of an integral brand placement-one that is central to actual game play-but not of peripheral brands, which simply appear within the game. Regardless of brand type, players using a traditional controller exhibit significantly greater recall than those who use a newer, more naturally mapping controller. An interaction effect indicates that the influence of controller type disappears when customization is allowed; this effect is not specific to either type of brand. These results are interpreted through models of processing fluency and the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing. The article concludes with marketing implications regarding technological videogame advances."

From the abstract: "Objective: We report the design of a trial to assess the educational efficacy of InsuOnline, a game for education of primary care physicians (PCPs). The goal of InsuOnline was to improve appropriate initiation and adjustment of insulin for the treatment of DM. InsuOnline was designed to be educationally adequate, self-motivating, and attractive. Methods: A multidisciplinary team of endocrinologists, experts in medical education, and programmers, was assembled for the design and development of InsuOnline. Currently, we are conducting usability and playability tests, with PCPs and medical students playing the game on a desktop computer. Adjustments will be made based on these results. An unblinded randomized controlled trial with PCPs who work in the city of Londrina, Brazil, will be conducted to assess the educational validity of InsuOnline on the Web. In this trial, 64 PCPs will play InsuOnline, and 64 PCPs will undergo traditional instructional activities (lecture and group discussion). Knowledge on how to initiate and adjust insulin will be assessed by a Web-based multiple choice questionnaire, and attitudes regarding diabetes/insulin will be assessed by Diabetes Attitude Scale 3 at 3 time points-before, immediately after, and 6 months after the intervention. Subjects´ general impressions on the interventions will be assessed by a questionnaire. Software logs will be reviewed. Results: To our knowledge, this is the first research with the aim of assessing the educational efficacy of a computer game for teaching PCPs about insulin therapy in DM. We describe the development criteria used for creating InsuOnline. Evaluation of the game using a randomized controlled trial design will be done in future studies. Conclusions: We demonstrated that the design and development of a game for PCPs education on insulin is possible with a multidisciplinary team. InsuOnline can be an attractive option for large-scale continuous medical education to help imp

Abstract: "Player coordination is a key element in many multi-player real-time digital games and cooperative real-time multi-player modes are now common in many digital-game genres. Coordination is an important part of the design of these games for several reasons: coordination can change the game balance and the level of difficulty as different types and degrees of coordination can make the game easier or more difficult; coordination is an important part of 'playing like a team' which affects the quality of play; and coordination as a shared activity is a key to sociality that can add to the sociability of the game. Being able to exercise control over the design of these coordination requirements is an important part of developing successful games. However, it is currently difficult to understand, describe, analyze or design coordination requirements in game situations, because current frameworks and theories do not mesh with the realities of video game design. I developed a new framework (called PLATO) that can help game designers to understand, describe, design and manipulate coordination episodes. The framework deals with five atomic aspects of coordinated activity: Players, Locations, Actions, Time, and Objects. PLATO provides a vocabulary, methodology and diagram notation for describing and analyzing coordination. I demonstrate the framework's utility by describing coordination situations from existing games, and by showing how PLATO can be used to understand and redesign coordination requirements."

Abstract: "In recent years videogame companies have recognized the role of player engagement as a major factor in user experience and enjoyment. This en-couraged a greater investment in new types of game controllers such as the WiiMote™, Rock Band™ instruments and the Kinect™. However, the native software of these controllers was not originally designed to be used in other game applications. This work addresses this issue by building a middleware framework, which maps body poses or voice commands to actions in any game. This not only warrants a more natural and customized user-experience but it al-so defines an interoperable virtual controller. In this version of the framework, body poses and voice commands are respectively recognized through the Ki-nect's built-in cameras and microphones. The acquired data is then translated into the native interaction scheme in real time using a lightweight method based on spatial restrictions. The system is also prepared to use Nintendo's Wiimote™ as an auxiliary and unobtrusive gamepad for physically or verbally impractical commands. System validation was performed by analyzing the per-formance of certain tasks and examining user reports. Both confirmed this ap-proach as a practical and alluring alternative to the game's native interaction scheme. In sum, this framework provides a game-controlling tool that is totally customizable and very flexible, thus expanding the market of game consumers."

from the abstract: "In this dissertation, a study of the serious games' validity for assessing the in-vehicle information systems ergonomics is presented. Results show that by using low-cost serious game it is possible to successfully predict the interactions' impact on driving performance. Moreover, the developed serious game obtained very promising driving performance approximations to a high fidelity driving simulator. This simulator was used, along with the serious game, to study the impact of two elementary tasks in the current in-vehicle information systems: read text and navigate menus manually. Both tasks affected significantly the vehicle's lateral control, and less significantly the longitudinal control. A final experiment was conducted to confirm the existence of the serious game influence over the behaviour of subjects. It was possible to observe that the game applied a positive impact to drivers' behaviour by improving their lateral and longitudinal control over the vehicle."

Abstract: "With the increasing potential for gaming hardware and peripherals to support biometrics, their application within the games industry for software and design should be considered. This pa per assesses the ability to use a form of biometric measurement, heart rate, in real - time to improve the challenge and enjoyment of a game by catering it to individuals of varying ability . While the findings of this study are valuable to game developers in terested in providing additional dimensions to gameplay and testing, they may also be useful for those researching medical or the rapeutic applications for games . The results suggest that although the tested game was inherently challenging and enjoyable, t he adaptive affective gameplay was not altering the game enough to induce strong physiological or emotional responses from participants. Biofeedback games lend themselves to medical applications, but adaptive affective games can be used to respond sympathe tically to the player without requiring direct control of physiological responses as a form of input."

Abstract: "In 2010, the authors (Jacobs, a game design professor, Sugarman, a pediatrician, and Rice, a psychotherapist ) started meeting to brainstorm design and play concepts for a therapeutic, physiologically-controlled videogame intended for use by people diagnosed with anxiety and/or autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The goal was to combine cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), narrative therapy (NT) and biofeedback supported psychophysiological selfregulation (PSR) into a game that would engage adolescents and provide hard data on a player's physical and emotional states during a therapy session. The game concept that emerged is "MindGamersTM in School" (MG), a therapeutic game prototype being developed and tested across two 6-month sessions by the authors and two teams of undergraduate game design and development students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Pursuing the design required half the team to learn principles, terms and methods of strength-based, client-centered psychotherapy and their application to psychophysiological selfregulation and biofeedback theory and practice. The other half of the team needed to engage in understanding the current state of role-playing videogames, avatar creation systems and game design/development processes. This paper will describe the current game prototype and then focus on MG's design and development process by looking at how the initial design period brought the game design to its current state and how it has continued to influence the production process."

"In this study, we investigate these issues in the context of a table tennis video game. The results show that the impact of holding a physical controller, or indeed of the fidelity of that controller, does not appear in simple measures of performance. Rather, the difference between controllers is a function of the responsiveness of the game being controlled, as well as other factors to do with expectations, real world game experience and social context."

"The UT^2 game bot, created by computer scientists Jacob Schru, Igor Karpov and Risto Miikkulainen, won the Humanlike Bot Competition at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2012). "The idea of the competition is to evaluate how we can make game bots, non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible," explains Miikkulainen, professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences. "It is generally recognized that NPCs are relatively weak in most video games: their behavior is predictable and mechanical, and they often make mistakes that human players would be unlikely to make. Players often enjoy playing against other humans, because it provides a more interesting game experience. The goal of the competition is to promote more research in human-like bots, as well as evaluate how well we are currently doing in this area."

""The sixteen essays in this collection offer critical examinations of the issue of control in video games, including different ways to theorize and define control within video gaming and how control impacts game design and game play. Close readings of specific games consider how each locates elements of control in their structures"--Provided by publisher. Excerpted in Google Books. Published 2012.

Abstract: "The software engineering process for games has enough special structure that it can be formulated as a kind of game itself. This, in turn, p ermits the teaching of game construction in a unique way with new potential to motivate students. We present a new game design client program for an existing collaborative problem-solving website known as CoSolve. The client was built with an emphasis on increased interaction and fine control over a problem's state. With this comes the opportunity to more easily design and test games in the CoSolve space. It is our hope that this will teach and inspire student users to learn more about game design, problem posing, and programming in general."

"This paper describes the creation of the game Endless Web, a 2D platforming game in which the player's actions determine the ongoing creation of the world she is exploring. Endless Web is an example of a PCG-based game: it uses procedural content generation (PCG) as a mechanic, and its PCG system, Launchpad, greatly influenced the aesthetics of the game. All of the player's strategies for the game revolve around the use of procedural content generation. Many design challenges were encountered in the design and creation of Endless Web, for both the game and modifications that had to be made to Launchpad. These challenges arise largely from a loss of fine-grained control over the player's experience; instead of being able to carefully craft each element the player can interact with, the designer must instead craft algorithms to produce a range of content the player might experience. In this paper we provide a definition of PCG-based game design and describe the challenges faced in creating a PCG-based game. We offer our solutions, which impacted both the game and the underlying level generator, and identify issues which may be particularly important as this area matures."

Abstract: "For over 40 years, researchers investigated utilizing video games for education. Some of that research focused on the type of pedagogical content to embed in a game and how to integrate it, while others emphasized how to preserve the inherent intrinsic motivation in games. One of the many factors that could affect motivation and learning in video games is the different intrapersonal elements and attributes of games. In order to test those attributes' effect on motivation and learning we need to be able to define them and clearly establish a method for measuring them. The object of this study is to establish a framework for measuring three of these attributes, Challenge, Control and Goals, based on user perception. This framework is an initial step to establish a clear metric for measuring those attributes in five different game genres: First-Person Shooter, Racing, RPG, Arcade and Sports."

Abstract: "Older adults in nursing homes often lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Full-body motion-control games provide an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; but these games are not designed with age-related impairments in mind, which prevents the games from being leveraged to increase the activity levels of older adults. In this paper, we create a gardening game specifically addressing institutionalized older adults. Additionally, we present an evaluation of the game that demonstrates how full-body motion-control games can accommodate a variety of user abilities, have a positive effect on mood and, by extension, the emotional well-being of older adults, thereby increasing their quality of life."

The University of Utah's latest prototype of a new kind of video game controller features typical thumb joysticks (white) but also has a round, red "tactor" in the center of each joystick to tug gently at the thumb tips.

Abstract: "Abstract Game developers spend a large portion of their time developing and tweaking the articial intelligence in video games. Problems related to productivity in the development of AI have been solved using various modeling techniques in the eld of AI, language design and easier to use editors. Using a domain specic language to assist in describing AI can increase productivity in this area. In addition to this, game developers can be relieved from irrelevant tasks such as worrying about performance, correctness of the implementation, memory management and optimiza- tion data structures and focus on the high level description of the game play. In this thesis, we focus on real-time video games and we investigate the development of a domain-specic language containing the necessary elements to describe and execute strategies to achieve goals in a real-time video game. We develop a domain-specic language to express strategies for computer controlled actors using techniques commonly found in em- bedded domain-specic languages, and in particular embedded domain- specic languages in Haskell. To demonstrate this language we have developed a prototype of a real-time strategy game that uses strategies implemented using the domain-specic language developed in this thesis"