Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages, notations, patterns, and tools, can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development

Compressing and Comparing the Generative Spaces of Procedural Content Generators

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the level of research interest in procedural content generation (PCG) for digital games, and there are now numerous research avenues focused on new approaches for driving and applying PCG systems. An area in which progress has been comparatively slow is the development of generalisable approaches for comparing alternative PCG systems, especially in terms of their generative spaces. It is to this area that this paper aims to make a contribution, by exploring the utility of data compression algorithms in compressing the generative spaces of PCG systems. We hope that this approach could be the basis for developing useful qualitative tools for comparing PCG systems to help designers better understand and optimize their generators. In this work we assess the efficacy of a selection of algorithms across sets of levels for 2D tile-based games by investigating how much their respective generative space compressions correlate with level behavioral characteristics. We conclude that the approach looks to be a promising one despite some inconsistency in efficacy in alternative domains, and that of the algorithms tested Multiple Correspondence Analysis appears to perform the most effectively

Compressing and Comparing the Generative Spaces of Procedural Content Generators.

The past decade has seen a rapid increase in the level of research interest in procedural content generation (PCG) for digital games, and there are now numerous research avenues focused on new approaches for driving and applying PCG systems. An area in which progress has been comparatively slow is the development of generalisable approaches for comparing alternative PCG systems, especially in terms of their generative spaces. It is to this area that this paper aims to make a contribution, by exploring the utility of data compression algorithms in compressing the generative spaces of PCG systems. We hope that this approach could be the basis for developing useful qualitative tools for comparing PCG systems to help designers better understand and optimize their generators. In this work we assess the efficacy of a selection of algorithms across sets of levels for 2D tile-based games by investigating how much their respective generative space compressions correlate with level behavioral characteristics. We conclude that the approach looks to be a promising one despite some inconsistency in efficacy in alternative domains, and that of the algorithms tested Multiple Correspondence Analysis appears to perform the most effectively

The Right Variety: Improving Expressive Range Analysis with Metric Selection Methods

Expressive Range Analysis (ERA), an approach for visualising the output of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) systems, is widely used within PCG research to evaluate and compare generators, often to make comparative statements about their relative performance in terms of output diversity and search space exploration. Producing a standard ERA visualisation requires the selection of two metrics which can be calculated for all generated artefacts to be visualised. However, to our knowledge there are no methodologies or heuristics for justifying the selection of a specific metric pair over alternatives. Prior work has typically either made a selection based on established but unjustified norms, designer intuition, or has produced multiple visualisations across all possible pairs. This work aims to contribute to this area by identifying valuable characteristics of metric pairings, and by demonstrating that pairings that have these characteristics have an increased probability of producing an informative ERA projection of the underlying generator. We introduce and investigate three quantifiable selection criteria for assessing metric pairs, and demonstrate how these criteria can be operationalized to rank those available. Though this is an early exploration of the concept of quantifying the utility of ERA metric pairs, we argue that the approach explored in this paper can make ERA more useful and usable for both researchers and game designers.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, and presented at the associated conference in Lisbon, April 2023. 11 pages, 6 figures, 3 table

Fifth Aeon – A.I Competition and Balancer

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that do not upset the balance of an existing collectible card game. The submissions to the A.I competition include one that plays substantially better than the existing Fifth Aeon A.I with a higher winrate across multiple game formats. The balancer system also demonstrates an ability to automatically balance several types of cards against a wide variety of parameters. These results help pave the way to cheaper CCG development with more compelling A.I opponents

Ih­mi­sen ja tie­to­ko­neen vä­li­nen yh­teis­luo­vuus : runoja kirjoittavien yh­teis­luo­vien jär­jes­tel­mien suun­nit­te­lu ja ar­vioin­ti sekä yh­teis­luo­van pro­ses­sin mal­lin­ta­mi­nen

Human-computer co-creativity examines creative collaboration between humans and artificially intelligent computational agents. Human-computer co-creativity researchers assume that instead of using computational systems to merely automate creative tasks, computational creativity methods can be leveraged to design computational collaborators capable of sharing creative responsibility with a human collaborator. This has potential for extending both human and computational creative capability. This thesis focuses on the case of one human and one computational collaborator. More specifically this thesis studies how children collaborate with a computational collaborator called the Poetry Machine in the linguistically creative task of writing poems. This thesis investigates three topics related to human-computer co-creativity: The design of human-computer co-creative systems, their evaluation and the modelling of human-computer co-creative processes. These topics are approached from two perspectives: an interaction design perspective and a computational creativity perspective. The interaction design perspective provides practical methods for the design and evaluation of interactive systems as well as methodological frameworks for analysing design practices in the field. The computational creativity perspective then again provides a theoretical view to the evaluation and modelling of human-computer co-creativity. The thesis itself consists of five papers. This thesis starts with an analysis of the interaction design process for computational collaborators. The design process is examined through a review of case studies, and a thorough description of the design process of the Poetry Machine system described in Paper I. The review shows that several researchers in the field have assumed a user-centered design approach, but some good design practices, including the reporting of design decisions, iterative design and early testing with users are not yet fulfilled according to the best standards. After illustrating the general design process, this thesis examines different approaches to the evaluation of human-computer co-creativity. Two case studies are conducted to evaluate the usability of and user experiences with the Poetry Machine system. The first evaluations are described in Paper II. They produced useful feedback for developing the system further. The second evaluation, described in Papers III and IV, investigates specific metrics for evaluating the co-creative writing experience in more detail. To promote the accumulation of design knowledge, special care is taken to report practical issues related to evaluating co-creative systems. These include, for example, issues related to formulating suitable evaluation tasks. Finally the thesis considers modelling human-computer co-creativity. Paper V approaches modelling from a computationally creative perspective, by extending the creativity-as-a-search paradigm into co-creative systems. The new model highlights specific issues for interaction designers to be aware of when designing new computational collaborators.Ihmisen ja tietokoneen välinen yhteisluovuus on tutkimusala, joka käsittelee ihmisten ja tekoälyagenttien välistä luovaa yhteistyötä. Tekoälyagenttien perustana toimivat uudet laskennallisen luovuuden metodit. Ne mahdollistavat pelkän luovien tehtävien automatisoinnin sijaan tasapainoisemman vastuunjaon ja vuorovaikutuksen ihmisen ja tekoälyagentin välillä. Tämä tarjoaa sekä ihmisille että laskennallisille agenteille uusia luovia mahdollisuuksia. Väitöskirja keskittyy erityisesti yhden ihmisen ja laskennallisesti luovan agentin yhteistyöhön. Väitöskirja koostuu viidestä erillisestä julkaisusta, ja siihen kuuluvissa tapaustutkimuksissa havainnoidaan lasten ja laskennalliseen kielelliseen luovuuteen perustuvan Runokone–nimisen laskennallisesti luovan agentin yhteistyötä. Väitöskirjassa käsitellään ihmisen ja tietokoneen välisen yhteisluovuuden kolmea teemaa: yhteisluovien järjestelmien suunnittelua, niiden arviointia ja ihmisen ja tietokoneen välisen yhteisluovan prosessin mallinnusta. Teemojen tutkimiseen käytetään vuorovaikutussuunnittelun ja laskennallisen luovuuden menetelmiä. Vuorovaikutussuunnittelu tarjoaa käytännönläheisiä menetelmiä järjestelmien suunnitteluun ja arviointiin sekä erilaisia teoreettisia näkökulmia alalla vallitsevien suunnittelukäytäntöjen tarkasteluun. Laskennallisen luovuuden tutkimus puolestaan tarjoaa teoreettisen näkökulman yhteisluovien järjestelmien arviointiin ja yhteisluovuuden mallinnukseen. Ensimmäistä teemaa, yhteisluovien järjestelmien suunnittelua, käsitellään väitöskirjan julkaisussa I. Julkaisussa kuvataan yhteisluovien järjestelmien yleistä vuorovaikutussuunnitteluprosessia tapaustutkimuskatsauksen kautta, ja tarkastellaan Runokoneen suunnitteluprosessia. Tutkimuskatsaus osoittaa alan tutkijoiden usein valitsevan tutkimuksensa lähtökohdaksi käyttäjäkeskeisen suunnittelun. He kuitenkin noudattavat parhaita vuorovaikutussuunnittelun käytäntöjä vain löyhästi. Tiedeyhteisön sisällä tulisikin siksi parantaa erityisesti suunnittelupäätösten dokumentointia, iteratiivista suunnittelua ja varhaista käyttäjätestausta. Toista teemaa, ihmisen ja koneen välisen yhteisluovuuden arviointia, tarkastellaan väitöksessä kahden tapaustutkimuksen kautta. Niistä ensimmäisessä keskitytään Runokoneen käytettävyyden arviointiin ja toisessa Runokoneen käyttäjien kokemusten arviointiin. Käytettävyyden arviointia on kuvattu tarkemmin julkaisussa II. Arviointi tuotti hyödyllistä palautetta järjestelmän jatkokehitystä varten. Julkaisuissa III ja IV tarkastellaan mittareita, joiden avulla voidaan arvioida tarkemmin käyttäjien käyttäjäkokemuksia erilaisissa yhteisluovan kirjoittamisen prosesseissa. Vuorovaikutussuunnittelun tutkimuksen ja käytännön suunnittelutyön tukemiseksi julkaisuissa paneudutaan erityisesti yhteisluovien järjestelmien arvioinnin käytännön ongelmiin. Näihin kuuluu esimerkiksi sopivien arviointitehtävien muodostaminen. Lopuksi väitöskirjassa käsitellään ihmisen ja koneen välisen yhteisluovuuden mallinnusta. Julkaisussa V tarkastellaan mallinnusta laskennallisen luovuuden näkökulmasta laajentamalla luovan haun paradigmaa yhteisluoviin järjestelmiin. Luovan haun paradigma kuvaa luomisprosessia sekä esteettisesti miellyttävien että luovaan kohdealaan sopivien artefaktien etsintänä hakuavaruudessa. Kuvatussa laajennuksessa painottuvat vuorovaikutussuunnittelun kannalta oleelliset ristiriitatilanteet, joiden ratkaisutavat vaikuttavat laskennallisesti luovien yhteistyökumppaneiden ominaisuuksiin

Designing Games to Collect Human-Subject Data

Applied games align the 'fun' of gameplay with real-world outcomes to achieve social good. For data collection outcomes (e.g. where games are used for experiments or citizen science) various templates and taxonomies for design have been proposed to achieve this alignment. However, existing approaches assume it is always possible to evaluate (and validate) collected data against either 'ground truth' or intersubjective consensus. On the contrary, a significant proportion of human-subjects research is concerned with datums that cannot be validated in this way, such as latent traits and beliefs (e.g. ice cream preference, which cannot be 'validated' against a correct value). Despite extensive knowledge from the social science methodological literature, we do not have comparable templates or taxonomies that can help to design and analyse data collection games for these kinds of data: we cannot yet turn experiments into 'elicitation games'. This thesis develops a theoretical model for such `elicitation games', using language elicitation as a case study. Elicitation games must satisfy requirements of validity and motivation. First, I survey validity threats characteristic of the use of games in experiments. Second, I construct a grounded theory of speech motivation to understand what motivates data-providing behaviours in applied games. Integrating these, I theoretically justify a generalised model of data elicitation in games: Intrinsic Elicitation. Finally, to identify which validity threats are of primary importance within this model, I run a series of controlled experiments comparing accuracy rates using a novel elicitation game for eliciting adjective order. This thesis contributes a framework for integrating game design and social science experimental concerns and how they may influence each other for the design and analysis of elicitation games. I find that games incentive rational players to misalign data to experimental outcomes. This can be solved by novel game designs that follow Intrinsic Elicitation

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies

The Playful Citizen

This edited volume collects current research by academics and practitioners on playful citizen participation through digital media technologies