Applying social norms to implicit negotiation among Non-Player Characters in serious games

Abstract-Believable Non Player Characters (NPCs), i.e. artificial characters simulating rational entities, are a great addition to videogames, no matter if used for entertainment or serious reasons. Especially NPCs that represent people in realistic settings need to show plausible behaviors; to this end, one of main issues to be tackled is coordination with other participants, either other NPCs or human players, when performing everyday tasks such as crossing doors, queuing at an office, picking the first free object up from a set, and so on. Much of this coordination happens silently and is driven by social norms that may vary according to culture and context. In this paper, we propose an approach to represent social norms in autonomous agents and enable implicit coordination driven by observations of others' behavior. Our approach does not use central coordinators or a coordination protocol, but rather let each agent take its own decision so to support more realistic interactions with human players. A software architecture and initial experimental results are presented and discussed

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

Designing role-play simulations for climate change decision-making: a step-by-step approach to facilitate cooperation between science and policy

Literature has demonstrated the benefits of role-play simulations (RPS) for decision-making and social learning in the field of climate change and environmental policy. Despite growing interest, step-by-step guidelines are still rare when it comes to the practical design and implementation of RPS, which hinders the adoption and implementation of this promising approach. This article aims to facilitate the development of RPS by proposing a step-by-step framework for designing role-play simulations around three stages – before, during, and after the simulation. To develop the methodology, we use as a starting point a pilot simulation on decision-making and knowledge production in contexts of uncertainty and complexity. Focusing on negative emission technologies in Switzerland, the pilot simulation involved 12 scientists and 12 politicians who role-played each other for half a day. Overall, we propose an actionable framework for RPS designed to facilitate cooperation between groups with different socialisations, timelines, and imperatives towards more informed and collaborative decision-making practices. Doing so, this article contributes to making RPS more accessible to a broad audience as a method supporting cooperation between science and policy in the field of climate and environmental politics and beyond

Framing Strategies in Role-Playing Games. 'My Pleasure': Toward a Poetics of Framing in Tabletop Role-playing Games

The dissertation discusses the use and impact of “literary” framing (as by Werner Wolf) in generating and negotiating fictional spaces, narratives and meanings within the medium of tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). In a second step, the text describes some of the specific and most salient framing features and strategies used by players during game sessions. By analyzing these through actual gameplay it is possible to identify the ‘transceptional’ border (Bunia) between reality and fiction to be the constitutive moment of role-play where players are both aware of, and immersed in, the fiction they collaboratively construct. Finally, the dissertation adapts Wolf’s theoretical framework in order to discuss and analyze the often overlooked category of “storytelling” TRPGs - one that, as the text argues, rather than focusing on narrative as such, aims at creating gameplay texts with heightened aesthetic and literary value while also enabling players to experience particular forms of immersion and deep emotional involvement. In the conclusion, the dissertation proposes re-conceptualizing literary framing as a defining characteristic of the fictional practice in general across media. In this regard, the dissertation argues, TRPGs reveal how framings are used and adapted in order to enable a specific mode of human interaction which is based on the figuration of emotional complexes via fictional “masks.

The right way to play a game

Is there a right or wrong way to play a game? Many think not. Some have argued that, when we insist that players obey the rules of a game, we give too much weight to the author’s intent. Others have argued that such obedience to the rules violates the true purpose of games, which is fostering free and creative play. Both of these responses, I argue, misunderstand the nature of games and their rules. The rules do not tell us how to interpret a game; they merely tell us what the game is. And the point of the rules is not always to foster free and creative play. The point can be, instead, to communicate a sculpted form of activity. And in games, as with any form of communication, we need some shared norms to ground communicative stability. Games have what has been called a “prescriptive ontology.” A game is something more than simply a piece of material. It is some material as approached in a certain specified way. These prescriptions help to fix a common object of attention. Games share this prescriptive ontology with more traditional kinds of works. Novels are more than just a set of words on a page; they are those words read in a certain order. Games are more than just some software or cardboard bits; they are those bits interacted with according to certain rules. Part of a game’s essential nature is the prescriptions for how we are to play it. What’s more, we investigate the prescriptive ontology of games, we will uncover at least distinct prescriptive categories of games. Party games prescribe that we encounter the game once; heavy strategy games prescribe we encounter the game many times; and community evolution games prescribe that we encounter the game while embedded in an ongoing community of play

Playing with value: player engagements with videogames as a negotiation of net cultural worth

This thesis explains the results of a research programme which set out to empirically create a theory relating to players’ experience of videogame playing and the methodology employed in doing so. With the perspective that many empirically derived or tested contemporary theories are not sufficient for accounting for engagement in the majority of cases, a semi-inductive theory generation methodology was selected, interpreted, and employed. The theoretical concept so derived is that in order to engage with a videogame product players must find an overall sense of cultural value in the products they encounter. This sense of value corresponds to games at a feature level, the user making judgements about salient design features, and is not fixed but is constantly evaluated as the player encounters the game, from when they are selecting the concept of a game, through play, to when they are reflecting on the experience in relation to other products. The evaluation of features seems to involve the player 'identifying' with the individual design features in that there is an implicit intra personal questioning of “Am I the kind of person who would play a game with this feature?” which might be described as an expression of the user's personal culture or assumed socially relative self sense. If they feel that they are the kind of person who would play a game with that feature then this value judgement will have a positive influence on their engagement, if they are not then it will affect the user’s engagement negatively. The features so evaluated in this way can be any personally salient design feature at all, such as game mechanics, graphical representation or even packaging. These weighted judgements then act together in summation to determine the player's potential engagement. Also included is a justification for the selection, interpretation, application, and pragmatics of the Classic Grounded Theory Methodology (CGT), as employed in this programme of research. Grounded Theory (GT) was selected as it initially promised to be suitably open and exploratory, and advice relating to CGT was employed most often as it frequently provided the most reasonable set of methods for proceeding. However substantial effort was required in both understanding what the published advice on applying the methodology meant, and how it applied to the current problem. Sections are included which tell the story of the practical process of both attempting to apply the methodology, and understand the implications of that application at the same time, and an attempt is made to summarise tricky areas (potential misunderstandings and seeming myths) and explain the understanding of the methodology relative to these issues as it was was employed in this research. In conclusion the derived theory seems to demonstrate a reasonable degree of 'fit' and 'relevance'; a conclusion which is supported by a survey of academic and industry specialists. As such, the methodology employed might be said to be useful in generating novel theoretical results. Also, the theory can be expressed as a substantive instantiation of existing general theories of human cultural behaviour such as Cooley's 'Looking Glass Self' (1902). It is also felt that the theory could be readily modified to account for further insights into the domain. These conclusions suggest that the hypotheses generated are useful for investigating the domain of videogame play and engagement

Platform, culture, identities: exploring young people's game-making

Digital games are an important component in the contemporary media landscape. They are cultural artefacts and, as such, are subjected to specific conventions. These conventions shape our imaginary about games, defining, for example, what a game is, who can play them and where. Different research has been developed to understand and challenge these conventions, and one of the strategies often adopted is fostering game-making among “gaming minorities”. By popularising games and their means of production, critical skills towards these objects could be developed, these conventions could be fought, and our perceptions of those artefacts could be transformed. Nevertheless, digital games, as obvious as it sounds, are also digital: they depend on technology to exist and are subjected to different technologies’ affordances and constraints. Technologies, however, are not neutral and objective, but are also cultural: they too are influenced by values and conventions. This means that, even if the means of production of digital games are distributed among more diverse groups, we should not ignore the role played by technology in this process of shaping our imaginary about games. Cultural and technical aspects of digital media are not, therefore, as conflicting as it might seem, finding themselves entangled in digital games. They are also equally influential in our understanding and our cultural uses of these artefacts; but how influential are they? How easy can one go against cultural and technical conventions when producing a game as a non-professional? Can anyone make any kind of game? In this research, I explore young people’s game-making practices in non-professional contexts to understand how repertoires, gaming conventions and platform affordances and constraints can be influential in this creative process. I organised two different game-making clubs for young people in London/UK (one at a community-led centre for Latin American migrants and other at a comprehensive primary school). The clubs consisted in a series of workshops offered in a weekly basis, totalling a minimum of 12 hours of instruction/production at each research site. The participants were aged between 11 and 18 and produced a total of 11 games across these two sites with MissionMaker, a software that facilitates the creation of 3D games by non-specialists through ready-made 3D assets, custom audio and image files, and a simplified drop-down-list-based scripting language. Three games and their production teams were selected as case studies and investigated through qualitative methods and under a descriptive-interpretive approach. Throughout the game-making clubs, short surveys, observations, unstructured and semi-structured interviews and a game archive (with week-by-week saves of participants’ games) were employed to generate data that was then analysed through a Multimodal Sociosemiotics framework to explore how cultural and technical conventions were appropriated by participants during this experience. Discourses, gaming conventions and MissionMaker’s affordances and constraints were appropriated in different ways by participants in the process of game production, culminating in the realisation of different discourses and the construction of diverse identities. These results are relevant since they restate the value of a more holistic approach – one that looks at both culture and technology – to critical videogame production within non-professional contexts. These results are also useful to the mapping of the influence of repertoires, conventions and platforms in non-professional game-making contexts, highlighting how these elements are influential but at the same time not prescriptive to the games produced, and how game development processes within these contexts are better understood as dialogical

Our Space: Being a Responsible Citizen of the Digital World

Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.Our Space was co-developed by The Good Play Project and Project New Media Literacies (established at MIT and now housed at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism). The Our Space collaboration grew out of a shared interest in fostering ethical thinking and conduct among young people when exercising new media skills