89,516 research outputs found
Towards a generic method of evaluating game levels
This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the quality
of game levels across different games and even genres,
which is of key importance for making procedural
content generation and assisted game design tools more
generally applicable. Three game design patterns are
identified for having high generality while being easily
quantifiable: area control, exploration and balance. Formulas
for measuring the extent to which a level includes
these concepts are proposed, and evaluation functions
are derived for levels in two different game genres: multiplayer
strategy game maps and single-player roguelike
dungeons. To illustrate the impact of these evaluation
functions, and the similarity of impact across domains,
sets of levels for each function are generated using a
constrained genetic algorithm. The proposed measures
can easily be extended to other game genres.This research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT project
SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the FP7 ICT project
C2Learn (project no: 318480).peer-reviewe
Managing and monitoring equality and diversity in UK sport: An evaluation of the sporting equals Racial Equality Standard and its impact on organizational change
Despite greater attention to racial equality in sport in recent years, the progress of national sports organizations toward creating equality of outcomes has been limited in the United Kingdom. The collaboration of the national sports agencies, equity organizations and national sports organizations (including national governing bodies of sport) has focused on Equality Standards. The authors revisit an earlier impact study of the Racial Equality Standard in sport and supplement it with another round of interview material to assess changing strategies to manage diversity in British sport. In particular, it tracks the impact on organizational commitment to diversity through the period of the establishment of the Racial Equality Standard and its replacement by an Equality Standard that deals with other diversity issues alongside race and ethnicity. As a result, the authors question whether the new, generic Equality Standard is capable of addressing racial diversity and promoting equality of outcomes. © 2006 Sage Publications
Student interactions in online discussion forums: their perception on learning with business simulation games
Digital technology offers new teaching methods with controversial results over learning. They allow students to develop a more active participation in their learning process although it does not always drive to unequivocal better learning outcomes. This study aims to offer additional evidence on the contribution of business simulation games to students' learning outcomes, considering student interactions in online discussion forums. We conducted a qualitative research with the online discussion forums of 5 different courses at bachelor and master levels, which involves 41 students' teams. The final sample was composed of 3681 messages posted by the students. The results reveal that some generic and specific managerial skills exert a positive influence on learning outcomes. Students mostly highlighted teamwork, decision-making, information processing, reaching agreements, and dealing with uncertainty as the most relevant contributions of the game towards their learning. These results have instructional and pedagogical implications for determining the best way to enhance students' motivation and learning outcomes when using digital technology methods, which involves recommendations that affect their design and monitoring
Shallow decision-making analysis in General Video Game Playing
The General Video Game AI competitions have been the testing ground for
several techniques for game playing, such as evolutionary computation
techniques, tree search algorithms, hyper heuristic based or knowledge based
algorithms. So far the metrics used to evaluate the performance of agents have
been win ratio, game score and length of games. In this paper we provide a
wider set of metrics and a comparison method for evaluating and comparing
agents. The metrics and the comparison method give shallow introspection into
the agent's decision making process and they can be applied to any agent
regardless of its algorithmic nature. In this work, the metrics and the
comparison method are used to measure the impact of the terms that compose a
tree policy of an MCTS based agent, comparing with several baseline agents. The
results clearly show how promising such general approach is and how it can be
useful to understand the behaviour of an AI agent, in particular, how the
comparison with baseline agents can help understanding the shape of the agent
decision landscape. The presented metrics and comparison method represent a
step toward to more descriptive ways of logging and analysing agent's
behaviours
Reviews
Brian Clegg, Mining The Internet â Information Gathering and Research on the Net, Kogan Page: London, 1999. ISBN: 0â7494â3025â7. Paperback, 147 pages, ÂŁ9.99
Towards A Theory-Of-Mind-Inspired Generic Decision-Making Framework
Simulation is widely used to make model-based predictions, but few approaches
have attempted this technique in dynamic physical environments of medium to
high complexity or in general contexts. After an introduction to the cognitive
science concepts from which this work is inspired and the current development
in the use of simulation as a decision-making technique, we propose a generic
framework based on theory of mind, which allows an agent to reason and perform
actions using multiple simulations of automatically created or externally
inputted models of the perceived environment. A description of a partial
implementation is given, which aims to solve a popular game within the
IJCAI2013 AIBirds contest. Results of our approach are presented, in comparison
with the competition benchmark. Finally, future developments regarding the
framework are discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, IJCAI 2013 Symposium on AI in Angry Bird
Heuristic usability evaluation on games: a modular approach
Heuristic evaluation is the preferred method to assess usability in games when experts conduct this
evaluation. Many heuristics guidelines have been proposed attending to specificities of games but
they only focus on specific subsets of games or platforms. In fact, to date the most used guideline to
evaluate games usability is still Nielsenâs proposal, which is focused on generic software. As a
result, most evaluations do not cover important aspects in games such as mobility, multiplayer
interactions, enjoyability and playability, etc. To promote the usage of new heuristics adapted to
different game and platform aspects we propose a modular approach based on the classification of
existing game heuristics using metadata and a tool, MUSE (Meta-heUristics uSability Evaluation
tool) for games, which allows a rebuild of heuristic guidelines based on metadata selection in order
to obtain a customized list for every real evaluation case. The usage of these new rebuilt heuristic
guidelines allows an explicit attendance to a wide range of usability aspects in games and a better
detection of usability issues. We preliminarily evaluate MUSE with an analysis of two different
games, using both the Nielsenâs heuristics and the customized heuristic lists generated by our tool.UniĂłn Europea PI055-15/E0
A NPC Behaviour Definition System for Use by Programmers and Designers
In this paper we describe ZBL/0, a scripting system for defining NPC (Non Player Character) behaviour in FPS (First Person Shooter) games. ZBL/0 has been used to illustrate the use of scripting systems in computer games in general and the scripting of NPC behaviour in particular in the context of a book on game development. Many novice game designers
have clear ideas about how the computer game they imagine should work but have little knowledge â if any â about how their ideas can be implemented. This is why books on game creation (design, programming etc.), as well as all-in-one game creation systems â especially designed for ease of use and intended for an amateur audience â enjoy great popularity. A large proportion of these books however merely present solutions in the form of descriptions and explanations of specific implementations with inadequate
explanations of principles. While this may benefit rapid application development it often does not lead to a deeper understanding of the underlying concepts. The understanding of rule-based behaviour definition through simple scripting in computer games and the development of such scripts by programmers and designers is what we aim to address with the ZBL/0 system
Real-time adaptive track generation in racing games
Real-time Adaptive Track Generation in Racing Game
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