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

Generation and Analysis of Content for Physics-Based Video Games

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that can assist with the creation and analysis of digital content is a broad and challenging task for researchers. This topic has been most prevalent in the field of game AI research, where games are used as a testbed for solving more complex real-world problems. One of the major issues with prior AI-assisted content creation methods for games has been a lack of direct comparability to real-world environments, particularly those with realistic physical properties to consider. Creating content for such environments typically requires physics-based reasoning, which imposes many additional complications and restrictions that must be considered. Addressing and developing methods that can deal with these physical constraints, even if they are only within simulated game environments, is an important and challenging task for AI techniques that intend to be used in real-world situations. The research presented in this thesis describes several approaches to creating and analysing levels for the physics-based puzzle game Angry Birds, which features a realistic 2D environment. This research was multidisciplinary in nature and covers a wide variety of different AI fields, leading to this thesis being presented as a compilation of published work. The central part of this thesis consists of procedurally generating levels for physics-based games similar to those in Angry Birds. This predominantly involves creating and placing stable structures made up of many smaller blocks, as well as other level elements. Multiple approaches are presented, including both fully autonomous and human-AI collaborative methodologies. In addition, several analyses of Angry Birds levels were carried out using current state-of-the-art agents. A hyper-agent was developed that uses machine learning to estimate the performance of each agent in a portfolio for an unknown level, allowing it to select the one most likely to succeed. Agent performance on levels that contain deceptive or creative properties was also investigated, allowing determination of the current strengths and weaknesses of different AI techniques. The observed variability in performance across levels for different AI techniques led to the development of an adaptive level generation system, allowing for the dynamic creation of increasingly challenging levels over time based on agent performance analysis. An additional study also investigated the theoretical complexity of Angry Birds levels from a computational perspective. While this research is predominately applied to video games with physics-based simulated environments, the challenges and problems solved by the proposed methods also have significant real-world potential and applications

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

Towards the correlation of player preferences and behaviour for video game personalisation

As an electronic medium, video games are capable of adapting its rules and content to individual players at run-time in ways defined by designers during development. This player-centric video game adaptation is what we mean by video game personalisation. However, to enable a personalisation system to adapt a video game without explicitly asking the player each time, the difficult task of predicting some relevant aspect of the player becomes necessary. This thesis describes a methodology for observing a player profile made up of 22 gameplay preferences and player behaviour data within a testbed role-playing video game. Our primary goal was to test whether specific preferences and behavioural trends correlate in order to permit the prediction of gameplay preferences from in-game behaviour. A successful finding would enable video game designers to define gameplay rules that are dependent on the preferences of their future players, thus providing one avenue for the future commercial adoption of video game personalisation. While our results were inconclusive, the rationale for the process we followed is carefully described and contains many important considerations for future research of a similar type. It is still our firm belief that other work can build upon our own to one day enable some form of video game personalisation

Goal reasoning for autonomous agents using automated planning

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorAutomated planning deals with the task of finding a sequence of actions, namely a plan, which achieves a goal from a given initial state. Most planning research consider goals are provided by a external user, and agents just have to find a plan to achieve them. However, there exist many real world domains where agents should not only reason about their actions but also about their goals, generating new ones or changing them according to the perceived environment. In this thesis we aim at broadening the goal reasoning capabilities of planningbased agents, both when acting in isolation and when operating in the same environment as other agents. In single-agent settings, we firstly explore a special type of planning tasks where we aim at discovering states that fulfill certain cost-based requirements with respect to a given set of goals. By computing these states, agents are able to solve interesting tasks such as find escape plans that move agents in to safe places, hide their true goal to a potential observer, or anticipate dynamically arriving goals. We also show how learning the environment’s dynamics may help agents to solve some of these tasks. Experimental results show that these states can be quickly found in practice, making agents able to solve new planning tasks and helping them in solving some existing ones. In multi-agent settings, we study the automated generation of goals based on other agents’ behavior. We focus on competitive scenarios, where we are interested in computing counterplans that prevent opponents from achieving their goals. We frame these tasks as counterplanning, providing theoretical properties of the counterplans that solve them. We also show how agents can benefit from computing some of the states we propose in the single-agent setting to anticipate their opponent’s movements, thus increasing the odds of blocking them. Experimental results show how counterplans can be found in different environments ranging from competitive planning domains to real-time strategy games.Programa de Doctorado en Ciencia y Tecnología Informática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidenta: Eva Onaindía de la Rivaherrera.- Secretario: Ángel García Olaya.- Vocal: Mark Robert

Platform for decoupling experience managers and environments

Experience Management employs Artificial Intelligence technologies to enhance people's interactive application experiences by dynamically modifying the environment during the experience. In game-related research, there is a prevailing trend where each experience manager is tightly integrated with the specific environment it can manipulate. This integration poses a challenge in comparing different managers within a single environment or a single manager across multiple environments. In this dissertation, I propose a solution to address this issue by introducing EM-Glue, an intermediary software platform that decouples experience managers from the environments they can modify. Prior to presenting the solution, I provide a comprehensive problem description and conduct a literature review to explore the current state of the field. Subsequently, I outline the platform's structural design, including a communication protocol facilitating interaction between managers and environments, as well as the regular communication process. Additionally, I develop a use case to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. This involves employing an environment and two experience managers: the Camelot Wrapper, a software I constructed to extend the interactive visualization engine Camelot and connect it to the platform, PaSSAGE, an existing experience manager adapted for use with the platform, and a random experience manager. The evaluation results demonstrate the platform's ability to decouple experience managers from environments, enabling future work to compare experience managers across multiple environments

Project knole: an autocosmic approach to authoring resonant computational characters

Project knole, consisting of this thesis and a mixed reality installation artwork centred around a computational simulation, is a practice-based response to the question of how a character in a work of computational narrative art might maintain their defining quality of dynamic agency within a system (arguably one of the key potentials of the form), while achieving the ‘resonant’ qualities of characters in more materially-static artforms. In all aspects of this project, I explore a new design philosophy for achieving this balance; between the authorship of a procedural computational system, and the ability of that system to ‘resonate’ with the imagination of an audience. This philosophy, which I term the ‘autocosmic’, seeks inspiration for the curation of audience response outside the obvious boundaries of artistic discipline, across the wider spectrum of human imaginative engagement; examples often drawn from mostly non-aesthetic domains. As well as defining the terms ‘resonance’ and ‘autocosmic’, and delineating my methodology more generally, this thesis demonstrates how the ‘autocosmic’ was employed within my creative work. In particular, it shows how some of the perennial problems of computational character development might be mediated by exploring other non-aesthetic examples of imaginative, narrative engagement with personified systems. In the context of this project, such examples come from the historio-cultural relationship between human beings and the environments they inhabit, outside of formal artistic practice. From this ‘autocosmic’ launchpad, I have developed an artwork that starts to explore how this rich cultural and biological lineage of human social engagement with systemic place can be applied fruitfully to the development of a ‘resonant’ computational character