Scene driver: reusing broadcast animation content for engaging, narratively coherent games

Scene-Driver is a software toolkit for the reuse of broadcast animation content to provide new engaging experiences for children. It has been developed and tested using content from the children's television series "Tiny Planets". Scene-Driver can be used to produce variations on a domino-like game. When playing, the child selects from a set of tiles that depict, for example, characters from the series. The child manipulates the direction of a story in the Tiny Planet world by their choice of tile. The successful selection of a tile will result in a scene from the show being played. A scene is defined as a section from an episode which has certain self-contained narrative elements such as conflict introduction, conflict resolution or comedic event. A scene-supervisor uses these descriptions to ensure that as well as having all the properties prescribed by the child's choice of tile, the scenes are presented in a coherent order according to certain plot and directorial principles. Inter-scene continuity is provided in the form of transition scenes which depict the departure and arrival of relevant characters between one scene and the next. Preliminary evaluations have demonstrated the potential of Scene-Driver to produce engaging and usable games based on broadcast content for young children

Games for Active XML Revisited

The paper studies the rewriting mechanisms for intensional documents in the Active XML framework, abstracted in the form of active context-free games. The safe rewriting problem studied in this paper is to decide whether the first player, Juliet, has a winning strategy for a given game and (nested) word; this corresponds to a successful rewriting strategy for a given intensional document. The paper examines several extensions to active context-free games. The primary extension allows more expressive schemas (namely XML schemas and regular nested word languages) for both target and replacement languages and has the effect that games are played on nested words instead of (flat) words as in previous studies. Other extensions consider validation of input parameters of web services, and an alternative semantics based on insertion of service call results. In general, the complexity of the safe rewriting problem is highly intractable (doubly exponential time), but the paper identifies interesting tractable cases.Comment: To be published in ICDT 201

Re-using Digital Narrative Content in Interactive Games

This paper presents a model, called Scene-Driver, for the reuse of film and television material. We begin by exploring general issues surrounding the ways in which content can be sub-divided into meaningful units for re-use and how criteria might then be applied to the selection and ordering of these units. We also identify and discuss the different means by which a user might interact with the content to create novel and engaging experiences. The Scene-Driver model has been instantiated using content from an animated children’s television series called Tiny Planets, which is aimed at children of 5-7 years old. This type of material, being story-based itself, lends itself particularly well to the application of narrative constraints to scene reordering, to provide coherence to the experience of interacting with the content. We propose an interactive narrative-driven game architecture, in which a user generates novel narratives from existing content by placing “domino” like tiles. These tiles act as “glue” between scenes and each tile-choice dictates certain properties of the next scene to be shown within a game. There are three different game-types, based on three different ways in which tiles can be matched to scenes. We introduce algorithms for generating legal tile-sets for each of these three game-types, which can be extended to include narrative constraints. This ensures that all novel orderings adhere to a minimum narrative plan, which has been identified based on analysis of the Tiny Planets series and on narrative theories. We also suggest ways in which basic narratives can be enhanced by the inclusion of directorial techniques and by the use of more complex plot structures. In our evaluation studies with children in the target age-range, our game compared favourably with other games that the children enjoyed playing

Rewriting the Game: Queer Trans Strategies of Survival, Resistance, and Relationality in Twine Games

This thesis explores how a selection of video games, created by transgender people using the free software Twine, create space for the survival and flourishing of queer and trans subjects through visions of transformative relationships. It deploys the lenses of queer theories of failure (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure), disidentification (Muñoz, Disidentifications), and utopianism (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia) to perform close readings of the techniques of narrative and game mechanics used as strategies for survival, resistance, and relationality in anna anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree and Queers in Love at the End of the World, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s With Those We Love Alive, and ira prince’s Queer Trans Mentally Ill Power Fantasy. The analysis focuses on games produced in and around the moment of the “Twine revolution” (Harvey) that aimed in the early 2010s to radically re-envision video games as spaces for minoritized subjects to thrive. Even as the transformation of video games culture as a whole remains an unrealized ideal, this paper argues for the importance of revisiting the under-examined queer strategies these games depict and enact in order to imagine possibilities for “rewrit[ing] the game” (Halberstam in Halberstam and Juul), and through this for “rewrit[ing] the map of everyday life” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 25), possibilities which can allow for the flourishing of queer and trans modes of relationality within and against toxic and exclusive norms in game play and design

Context-free games on strings and nested words

Kontextfreie Spiele sind ein formales Modell, welches in seiner einfachsten Form den Ableitungsmechanismus kontextfreier Grammatiken zu einem Spiel für zwei Spieler (genannt Juliet und Romeo) verallgemeinert; dabei wählt in einer gegebenen Satzform (d.h. einer Zeichenkette aus Terminal- und Nichtterminalsymbolen) jeweils Juliet ein zu ersetzendes Nichtterminalsymbol aus, worauf Romeo jeweils entsprechend den Ableitungsregeln entscheidet, wodurch dieses Nichtterminalsymbol ersetzt werden soll. Die Gewinnbedingung für Juliet in einem solchen Spiel ist das Erreichen einer Satzform aus einer gegebenen Zielsprache, wohingegen Romeo die Aufgabe hat, dies zu verhindern. Das zentrale algorithmische Problem in kontextfreien Spielen stellt die Frage, gegeben ein Spiel und eine initiale Satzform, ob Juliet in dem gegebenen Spiel auf der Satzform eine Gewinnstrategie hat. Die zentrale praktische Anwendung kontextfreier Spiele liegt in der Modellierung von Active XML-Dokumenten, d.h. XML-Dokumenten, die Referenzen auf externe Quellen enthalten, welche zur Laufzeit aufgerufen werden können um aktuelle Daten in das Dokument einzufügen. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es sinnvoll, Erweiterungen der oben genannten kontextfreien Spiele auf verschachtelte Wörter zu betrachten, also auf XML-artige Linearisierungen von Bäumen in Zeichenketten. Weitere praktisch motivierte Verallgemeinerungen beinhalten unter anderem die Modellierung von syntaktischer oder semantischer Behandlung von Aufrufparametern beim Aufruf externer Referenzen. Ziel dieser Dissertation ist, einen weitgehend vollständigen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand der Forschung zu kontextfreien Spielen auf Zeichenketten und verschachtelten Wörtern zu liefern. Dazu liefert sie jeweils komplexitätstheoretische Klassifizierungen des Gewinnproblems (und verwandter Probleme) für diverse Varianten kontextfreie Spiele auf Zeichenketten und verschachtelten Wörtern und gibt einen Überblick über Beweismethoden und algorithmische Techniken zur Behandlung dieses Gewinnproblems. Als Teil dieser Betrachtung stellt sie darüber hinaus grundlegende Ergebnisse zu relevanten Automatenmodellen auf verschachtelten Wörtern dar, darunter Varianten von alternierenden Automaten und Transducern

Taking-and-merging games as rewrite games

This work is a contribution to the study of rewrite games. Positions are finite words, and the possible moves are defined by a finite number of local rewriting rules. We introduce and investigate taking-and-merging games, that is, where each rule is of the form a^k->epsilon. We give sufficient conditions for a game to be such that the losing positions (resp. the positions with a given Grundy value) form a regular language or a context-free language. We formulate several related open questions in parallel with the famous conjecture of Guy about the periodicity of the Grundy function of octal games. Finally we show that more general rewrite games quickly lead to undecidable problems. Namely, it is undecidable whether there exists a winning position in a given regular language, even if we restrict to games where each move strictly reduces the length of the current position. We formulate several related open questions in parallel with the famous conjecture of Guy about the periodicity of the Grundy function of octal games

Taking-and-merging games as rewrite games

This work is a contribution to the study of rewrite games. Positions are finite words, and the possible moves are defined by a finite number of local rewriting rules{u_i→v_i}: a move consists in the substitution of one occurrence of u_i by v_i, for some i. We introduce and investigate taking-and-merging games, that is, where each rule is of the form a^k→ε. We give sufficient conditions for a game to be such that the losing positions (resp. the positions with a given Grundy value) form a regular language or a context-free language. We formulate several related open questions in parallel with the famous conjecture of Guy about the periodicity of the Grundy function of octal games.Finally we show that more general rewrite games quickly leadt o undecidable problems. Namely, it is undecidable whether there exists a winning position in a given regular language, even if we restrict to games where each move strictly reduces the length of the current positio