Procedural generation of video game cities for specific video game genres using wavefunctioncollapse (WFC)

Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Virtual cities as background scenarios can be used for many 3D video game genres like action. However, the procedural generation of virtual cities for specific video game genres is an on-going research problem. In this paper, we seek to establish a grounding for future work into city generation for specific game genres by exploring how game designers approach existing generation tool-sets. Firstly, we look at the video game city Skara Brae from the party-based role-playing game The Bard’s Tale and try to replicate it using the Wave Function Collapse (WFC) approach to procedural generation. We show in two experimental conditions which parameters for WFC are suitable for replicating the city. Secondly, a pilot user study with eight users shows how they approach creating different video game cities after they preselect a video game genre. The users’ video game level ideas are then discussed, and different output levels are generated using WFC

Serious storytelling – a first definition and review

© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New YorkIn human culture, storytelling is a long-established tradition. The reasons people tell stories are manifold: to entertain, to transfer knowledge between generations, to maintain cultural heritage, or to warn others of dangers. With the emergence of the digitisation of media, many new possibilities to tell stories in serious and non-entertainment contexts emerged. A very simple example is the idea of serious gaming, as in, digital games without the primary purpose of entertainment. In this paper, we introduce the term serious storytelling as a new potential media genre – defining serious storytelling as storytelling with a purpose beyond entertainment. We also put forward a review of existing potential application areas, and develop a framework for serious storytelling. We foresee several application areas for this fundamental concept, including wellbeing and health, medicine, psychology, education, ethical problem solving, e-leadership and management, qualitative journalism, serious digital games, simulations and virtual training, user experience studies, and online communication

Cellular Data Meet Vehicular Traffic Theory: Location Area Updates and Cell Transitions for Travel Time Estimation

Road traffic can be monitored by means of static sensors and derived from floating car data, i.e., reports from a sub-set of vehicles. These approaches suffer from a number of technical and economical limitations. Alternatively, we propose to leverage the mobile cellular network as a ubiquitous mobility sensor. We show how vehicle travel times and road congestion can be inferred from anonymized signaling data collected from a cellular mobile network. While other previous studies have considered data only from active devices, e.g., engaged in voice calls, our approach exploits also data from idle users resulting in an enormous gain in coverage and estimation accuracy. By validating our approach against four different traffic monitoring datasets collected on a sample highway over one month, we show that our method can detect congestions very accurately and in a timely manne

A Survey on Energy Efficiency in P2P Systems: File Distribution, Content Streaming and Epidemics

Several Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols and applications have been developed in order to allow file distribution/ sharing, video and music streaming, data and information dissemination. These P2P systems are regularly used by a large number of users, both in desktop and mobile environments and generate a remarkable portion of the overall Internet traffic. However, many common P2P protocols and applications were designed neglecting the energy problem. In fact, they often require always-on devices in order to work properly, thus producing significant energy wastes. The problem is even much more relevant in the mobile context, since the battery lifetime of mobile devices is limited. Therefore, energy efficiency in P2P systems is a highly debated topic in the literature. New P2P approaches – more energy efficient than traditional client/server solutions – have been proposed. In addition, several improvements to existing P2P protocols have been introduced in order to reduce their energy consumption. In this paper, we present a general taxonomy to classify state-of-the-art approaches to the energy problem in P2P systems and applications. Then, we survey the main solutions available in the literature, focusing on three relevant classes of P2P systems and applications, namely file sharing/distribution, content streaming and epidemics. Furthermore, we outline open issues and provide future research guidelines for each class of P2P systems