Group items tagged

Abstract: "the boom of Cloud Computing services in the recent years has created new opportunities and removed many of the limitations that are typically tied to software deployed on the Internet. It has been shown that the development of online games can benefit from the integration of Cloud services into their design in order to solve many of the problems that plague their development and maintenance. In this paper, we first discuss the current designs of online gaming architectures and present their limits. The solutions offered by using Cloud services in respect to these video games are then explored and the new problems that arise from this combination are addressed. We also present a case study by deploying an online First Person Shooter multiplayer video game on currently available Cloud infrastructures (using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and detailing our architecture specifically designed for this purpose. We show that, where once entering the market of online games was solely affordable by big companies due to the high infrastructure costs, a single person could now create and deploy an online game."

Value of computer game design and serious games courses for all computer students

Abstract: "Game Artificial Intelligence (Game AI) is a subdiscipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) that explores the ways in which AI and ML can augment player experiences in computer games. Storytelling is an integral part of many modern computer games; within games stories create context, motivate the player, and move the action forward. Interactive Narrative is the use of AI to create and manage stories within games, creating the perception that the player is a character in a dynamically unfolding and responsive story. This paper introduces Game AI and focuses on the open research problems of Interactive Narrative."

DICE Summit talk from Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney on exponentially increasing computing power and its impact on games

Her name is Angelina: she runs on a heavy-duty Mac server and she's building some addictive computer games for you. Angelina (a tail-recursive acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named ANGELINA") is a project in evolutionary computing by Michael Cook, a PhD candidate at Imperial College in the UK.

"This project created an Application Programming Interface (API) for a simulated modular digital game system. Each module consists of a triangle that displays colors at the center and edges, monitors an input and signals from the surrounding modules, and communicates with a computer controller. The API allows users to develop game programs for the system. The simulation runs the game files and displays the results. The focus was on practical coding and design of an instructional game system. The challenges in creating such a system provided a valuable learning environment for us in the areas of user interface design, system tool management and design, human computer interaction, and designing educational platforms"

"Objects in 3D games are typically shell models, a polygon mesh representing the shell or skin of the object. While emulation of the behaviour of shell models under combustion is sucient for many game applications and is fairly well studied, solid objects do in fact burn rather dierently than shell objects. We show how to manipulate shell models so that they appear to burn as solid models. Since our burning objects will be only a small part of a video game, computation speed is of the essence. We demonstrate that our method uses only a fraction of the computational power available by implementing the computation on a modest GPU using CUDA."

Report on Valve's new Big Picture "television-friendly" viewing product, and forays into wearable computing

Abstract: "A comprehensive undergraduate curriculum in computer game development is described. The program was created as a set of elective courses in the context of a traditional computer science (CS) degree. Primary goals of the program were to increase enrollment in CS and prepare students for careers in the entertainment software industry. In addition, the CS department sought to compete for students with larger state institutions. To do so effectively the department needed to offer a unique program. Results show the new program helped the CS department to nearly triple enrollment over four years and achieve both statewide prominence and national recognition."

Abstract: "Citizen science is a form of social computation where members of the public are recruited to contribute to scientific investigations. Citizen-science projects often use web-based systems to support collaborative scientific activities, making them a form of computer-supported cooperative work. However, finding ways to attract participants and confirm the veracity of the data they produce are key issues in making such systems successful. We describe a series of web-based tools and games currently under development to support taxonomic classification of organisms in photographs collected by citizen-science projects. In the design science tradition, the systems are purpose-built to test hypotheses about participant motivation and techniques for ensuring data quality. Findings from preliminary evaluation and the design process itself are discussed."

"This paper is a part of the game studies field from a design perspective. It investigates the computer game design process, focusing primarily on prototyping, as it is being performed in game development today. ... Potential users of prototypes and prototyping methods range from the designer and the design team, to beta testers and publishers. The focus in this paper is on internal use of prototypes, where the design team is the target audience. The prototype functions as a tool for getting the team on the same track and to introduce new members to the work. Prototypes and visualizations also tend to replace the game design document more and more. The work presented here is based on analysis of interviews with game designers. By applying perspectives from rhetoric, the aim is to investigate how the communication around the prototyping process within a design team can be improved."

"Abstract-While component reuse is a common concept in software engineering, it does not yet have a strong foothold in Computer Game development, in particular the development of computer-controlled game characters. In this work, we take a modular Statechart-based game AI modelling approach and develop a reuse strategy to enable fast development of new AIs. This is aided through the creation of a standardized interface for Statechart modules in a layered architecture. Reuse is enabled at a high-level through functional groups that encapsulate behaviour. These concepts are solidified with the development of the SkyAI tool. SkyAI enables a developer to build and work with a library of modular components to develop new AIs by composing modules, and then output the resulting product to an existing game. Efficacy is demonstrated by reusing AI components from a tank to quickly make a much different AI for a simple animal."

Merger between two companies developing "mobile devices into wireless controllers" for game use and other applications

"A Comprehensive Study of Sound in Computer Games: How Audio Affects Player ActionJørgensen, Kristine This study examines the functionality of sound in computer games, a topic which has received little attention in game studies and media studies." Especially focuses on player experience of sound

Abstract: "Mobile games - in particular, games played on smartphones and tablet computers - are becoming increasingly popular. Yet, there has been little research into whether players can experience immersion while playing mobile games. As the potential for immersive mobile games would be of interest to game developers, researchers and players, it is proposed to measure mobile immersion by comparing Osmos, a multi-platform ambient video game, on three differentsized devices - a smart phone, a tablet and a desktop computer."

Abstract: "Cloud gaming now makes any computer game playable on a thin client without the previous worries and frustrations about the hardware requirements. It frees players from the need to frequently upgrade their computers as they can now play games that are hosted on remote servers with a broadband Internet connection and a thin client. However, cloud games are intrinsically more susceptible to latency than online games because game graphics are rendered on cloud servers and thin clients do not possess game state information that is required by delay compensation techniques. In this paper, we investigate how the response latency in cloud gaming would affect users' experience and how the impact of latency on players' experience varies among different games. We show that not all games are equally friendly to cloud gaming. That is, the same degree of latency may have very different impacts on a game's quality of experience depending on the game's real-time strictness. We thus develop a model that can predict a game's real-time strictness based on the rate of players' inputs and the game screen dynamics. The model can be used to simultaneously enhance players' gaming and optimize the operation cost of data centers."

Abstract: "As computer games are an increasingly large industry, it is becoming increasingly important for people working in the eld to understand what elements of the game engage the player so as to improve the design of the game. By studying common techniques used in modern games, this paper looks to highlight how the techniques work and thereby provide developers and designers with more information to improve the use of these techniques in future games. The paper also re ects upon the applicability of these techniques outside of games specifically."

Abstract: "The video games industry develops ever more advanced technologies to improve rendering, image quality, ergonomics and user experience of their creations providing very simple to use tools to design new games. In the molecular sciences, only a small number of experts with specialized know-how are able to design interactive visualization applications, typically static computer programs that cannot easily be modified. Are there lessons to be learned from video games? Could their technology help us explore new molecular graphics ideas and render graphics developments accessible to non-specialists? This approach points to an extension of open computer programs, not only providing access to the source code, but also delivering an easily modifiable and extensible scientific research tool. In this work, we will explore these questions using the Unity3D game engine to develop and prototype a biological network and molecular visualization application for subsequent use in research or education. We have compared several routines to represent spheres and links between them, using either built-in Unity3D features or our own implementation. These developments resulted in a stand-alone viewer capable of displaying molecular structures, surfaces, animated electrostatic field lines and biological networks with powerful, artistic and illustrative rendering methods. We consider this work as a proof of principle demonstrating that the functionalities of classical viewers and more advanced novel features could be implemented in substantially less time and with less development effort. Our prototype is easily modifiable and extensible and may serve others as starting point and platform for their developments. A webserver example, standalone versions for MacOS X, Linux and Windows, source code, screen shots, videos and documentation are available at the address: http://unitymol.sourceforge.net/."

"e describe an approach for developing an in- telligent game master (GM) for computer role-playing games. The role of the GM is to set up the game environment, man- age the narrative ow and enforce the game rules whilst keeping the players engaged. Our approach is to use the popular Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of agents to de- veloping a GM."

Abstract: "Obesity has become an outstanding public health issue in most countries around the world. Many attempts have been made to address this issue that ranges from taking medication to doing exercise to follow- ing a diet plan to playing games. Few approaches combine exercise and game to engage the obese people in playing fun-based games or pur- poseful games, also known as serious games, while monitoring their bio- signals. However, existing work hardly provides a configurable, scalable and context-aware serious game framework that can be used as a sup- port for obesity treatment. In this paper, we take an attempt to propose such a framework. The proposed framework facilitates bio-signal monitor- ing based on body sensor network, context-awareness based on perva- sive sensors, and on-the-spot activity recommendation based on current game-playing context. It uses the cloud computing platform as infrastruc- tural support that ensures the scalability of the framework. In order to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed framework, we developed a sample serious game; deploy it over a cloud platform; and experiment with it by capturing some psycho-physical data while the obese are en- gaged in game-play. We observed that the obese people were very much engaged in game-play and they had positive experience using the system"