Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Serious Games in Cultural Heritage

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Exploring Fog of War Concepts in Wargame Scenarios

This thesis explores fog of war concepts through three submitted journal articles. The Department of Defense and U.S. Air Force are attempting to analyze war scenarios to aid the decision-making process; fog modeling improves realism in these wargame scenarios. The first article Navigating an Enemy Contested Area with a Parallel Search Algorithm [1] investigates a parallel algorithm\u27s speedup, compared to the sequential implementation, with varying map configurations in a tile-based wargame. The parallel speedup tends to exceed 50 but in certain situations. The sequential algorithm outperforms it depending on the configuration of enemy location and amount on the map. The second article Modeling Fog of War Effects in AFSIM [2] introduces the FAT for the AFSIM to introduce and manipulate fog in wargame scenarios. FAT integrates into AFSIM version 2.7.0 and scenario results verify the tool\u27s fog effects for positioning error, hits, and probability affect the success rate. The third article Applying Fog Analysis Tool to AFSIM Multi-Domain CLASS scenarios [3] furthers the verification of FAT to introduce fog across all war fighting domains using a set of CLASS scenarios. The success rate trends with fog impact for each domain scenario support FAT\u27s effectiveness in disrupting the decision-making process for multi-domain operations. The three articles demonstrate fog can affect search, tasking, and decision-making processes for various types of wargame scenarios. The capabilities introduced in this thesis support wargame analysts to improve decision-making in AFSIM military scenarios

Proceedings of the SAB'06 Workshop on Adaptive Approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the Workshop on Adaptive approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games held at the Ninth international conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB’06): From Animals to Animats 9 in Rome, Italy on 1 October 2006. We were motivated by the current state-of-the-art in intelligent game design using adaptive approaches. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are mainly focused on generating human-like and intelligent character behaviors. Meanwhile there is generally little further analysis of whether these behaviors contribute to the satisfaction of the player. The implicit hypothesis motivating this research is that intelligent opponent behaviors enable the player to gain more satisfaction from the game. This hypothesis may well be true; however, since no notion of entertainment or enjoyment is explicitly defined, there is therefore little evidence that a specific character behavior generates enjoyable games. Our objective for holding this workshop was to encourage the study, development, integration, and evaluation of adaptive methodologies based on richer forms of humanmachine interaction for augmenting gameplay experiences for the player. We wanted to encourage a dialogue among researchers in AI, human-computer interaction and psychology disciplines who investigate dissimilar methodologies for improving gameplay experiences. We expected that this workshop would yield an understanding of state-ofthe- art approaches for capturing and augmenting player satisfaction in interactive systems such as computer games. Our invited speaker was Hakon Steinø, Technical Producer of IO-Interactive, who discussed applied AI research at IO-Interactive, portrayed the future trends of AI in computer game industry and debated the use of academic-oriented methodologies for augmenting player satisfaction. The sessions of presentations and discussions where classified into three themes: Adaptive Learning, Examples of Adaptive Games and Player Modeling. The Workshop Committee did a great job in providing suggestions and informative reviews for the submissions; thank you! This workshop was in part supported by the Danish National Research Council (project no: 274-05-0511). Finally, thanks to all the participants; we hope you found this to be useful!peer-reviewe

New Game Physics - Added Value for Transdisciplinary Teams

This study focused on game physics, an area of computer game design where physics is applied in interactive computer software. The purpose of the research was a fresh analysis of game physics in order to prove that its current usage is limited and requires advancement. The investigations presented in this dissertation establish constructive principles to advance game physics design. The main premise was that transdisciplinary approaches provide significant value. The resulting designs reflected combined goals of game developers, artists and physicists and provide novel ways to incorporate physics into games. The applicability and user impact of such new game physics across several target audiences was thoroughly examined. In order to explore the transdisciplinary nature of the premise, valid evidence was gathered using a broad range of theoretical and practical methodologies. The research established a clear definition of game physics within the context of historical, technological, practical, scientific, and artistic considerations. Game analysis, literature reviews and seminal surveys of game players, game developers and scientists were conducted. A heuristic categorization of game types was defined to create an extensive database of computer games and carry out a statistical analysis of game physics usage. Results were then combined to define core principles for the design of unconventional new game physics elements. Software implementations of several elements were developed to examine the practical feasibility of the proposed principles. This research prototype was exposed to practitioners (artists, game developers and scientists) in field studies, documented on video and subsequently analyzed to evaluate the effectiveness of the elements on the audiences. The findings from this research demonstrated that standard game physics is a common but limited design element in computer games. It was discovered that the entertainment driven design goals of game developers interfere with the needs of educators and scientists. Game reviews exemplified the exaggerated and incorrect physics present in many commercial computer games. This “pseudo physics” was shown to have potentially undesired effects on game players. Art reviews also indicated that game physics technology remains largely inaccessible to artists. The principal conclusion drawn from this study was that the proposed new game physics advances game design and creates value by expanding the choices available to game developers and designers, enabling artists to create more scientifically robust artworks, and encouraging scientists to consider games as a viable tool for education and research. The practical portion generated tangible evidence that the isolated “silos” of engineering, art and science can be bridged when game physics is designed in a transdisciplinary way. This dissertation recommends that scientific and artistic perspectives should always be considered when game physics is used in computer-based media, because significant value for a broad range of practitioners in succinctly different fields can be achieved. The study has thereby established a state of the art research into game physics, which not only offers other researchers constructive principles for future investigations, but also provides much-needed new material to address the observed discrepancies in game theory and digital media design

On the definition of non-player character behaviour for real-time simulated virtual environments.

Computer games with complex virtual worlds, which are populated by artificial characters and creatures, are the most visible application of artificial intelligence techniques. In recent years game development has been fuelled by dramatic advances in computer graphics hardware which have led to a rise in the quality of real-time computer graphics and increased realism in computer games. As a result of these developments video games are gaining acceptance and cultural significance as a form of art and popular culture. An important factor for the attainment of realism in games is the artificially intelligent behaviour displayed by the virtual entities that populate the games' virtual worlds. It is our firm belief that to further improve the behaviour of virtual entities, game AI development will have to mirror the advances achieved in game graphics. A major contributing factor for these advancements has been the advent of programmable shaders for real-time graphics, which in turn has been significantly simplified by the introduction of higher level programming languages for the creation of shaders. This has demonstrated that a good system can be vastly improved by the addition of a programming language. This thesis presents a similar (syntactic) approach to the definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games. We introduce the term behaviour definition language (BDL), describing a programming language for the definition of game entity behaviour. We specify the requirements for this type of programming language, which are applied to the development and implementation of several behaviour definition languages, culminating in the design of a new game-genre independent behaviour definition (scripting) language. This extension programming language includes several game AI techniques within a single unified system, allowing the use of different methods of behaviour definition. A subset of the language (itself a BDL) was implemented as a proof of concept of this design, providing a framework for the syntactic definition of the behaviour of virtual entities in computer games