{"title":"Smart terrain causality chains for adventure-game puzzle generation","authors":"Isaac Dart, M. Nelson","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374173","url":null,"abstract":"Adventure videogames have the player assume the role of protagonist in an interactive story, which is primarily driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. A major drawback with this genre is minimal replayability, since the player has already seen what there is to explore, and knows how to solve the puzzles. We propose a technique to generate variations on puzzles that fit in the same location in the original story, and therefore don't require fully procedural story generation. We keep a database of smart terrain items, which can have effects on other items. Puzzles are generated by taking advantage of a duality between puzzle-solving and generation. Once we build smart terrain causality chains (STCCs) of puzzle solutions, a puzzle known to be solvable can be generated by simply inserting the items contained in a causality chain into the environment. We demonstrate this technique in an experimental videogame, Space Dust, which shows that even a very short adventure game can produce multiple interesting playthroughs when STCC-based puzzle generation is added.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131554748","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Computational creativity in a closed game system","authors":"C. Browne, S. Colton","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374169","url":null,"abstract":"This paper describes the early stages of an experiment investigating the role of the computer as a creative collaborator in the game design process. We introduce the Shibumi set, a closed game system so simple that its rule space can be completely defined, yet deep enough to allow interesting games to emerge. Constraining the search space to such a closed system has computational benefits, but had unexpected effects on the creative process of designers during a related game design contest. These effects yield some insight into the creative process of experienced game designers, in particular, the way they search for rule sets to realise desired behaviours, and suggest a simple unified model of the game design process. We suggest ways in which these insights may be incorporated into future work, to produce software that might not only search for new games more effectively and assist the designer as a creative collaborator, but to automate the game design process in ways that might be perceived as more creative.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121140503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Noor Shaker, Miguel Nicolau, Georgios N. Yannakakis, J. Togelius, M. O’Neill
{"title":"Evolving levels for Super Mario Bros using grammatical evolution","authors":"Noor Shaker, Miguel Nicolau, Georgios N. Yannakakis, J. Togelius, M. O’Neill","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374170","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374170","url":null,"abstract":"This paper presents the use of design grammars to evolve playable 2D platform levels through grammatical evolution (GE). Representing levels using design grammars allows simple encoding of important level design constraints, and allows remarkably compact descriptions of large spaces of levels. The expressive range of the GE-based level generator is analyzed and quantitatively compared to other feature-based and the original level generators by means of aesthetic and similarity based measures. The analysis reveals strengths and shortcomings of each generator and provides a general framework for comparing content generated by different generators. The approach presented can be used as an assistive tool by game designers to compare and analyze generators' capabilities within the same game genre.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126858705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Athanasios Papadopoulos, Konstantinos Toumpas, Anthony C. Chrysopoulos, P. Mitkas
{"title":"Exploring optimization strategies in board game Abalone for Alpha-Beta search","authors":"Athanasios Papadopoulos, Konstantinos Toumpas, Anthony C. Chrysopoulos, P. Mitkas","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374139","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the design and implementation of a highly efficient MiniMax algorithm for the game Abalone. For perfect information games with relatively low branching factor for their decision tree (such as Chess, Checkers etc.) and a highly accurate evaluation function, Alpha-Beta search proved to be far more efficient than Monte Carlo Tree Search. In recent years many new techniques have been developed to improve the efficiency of the Alpha-Beta tree, applied to a variety of scientific fields. This paper explores several techniques for increasing the efficiency of Alpha-Beta Search on the board game of Abalone while introducing some new innovative techniques that proved to be very effective. The main idea behind them is the incorporation of probabilistic features to the otherwise deterministic Alpha-Beta search.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115558099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Laurentiu Ilici, Jiaojian Wang, Olana Missura, Thomas Gärtner
{"title":"Dynamic difficulty for checkers and Chinese chess","authors":"Laurentiu Ilici, Jiaojian Wang, Olana Missura, Thomas Gärtner","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374138","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate the practical effectiveness of a theoretically sound algorithm for dynamic difficulty adjustment in computer games: Firstly, we show how the partially ordered set master (Posm) algorithm [11] can be incorporated in board games, taking checkers and Chinese chess as examples. Secondly, we describe an empirical study of (i) Posm on checkers against synthetic opponents of varying strength, (ii) Posm on chinese chess against synthetic opponents of varying strength, and (iii) Posm on Chinese chess against human opponents of varying strength. Our results indicate that Posm can indeed serve as a flexible and effective subroutine for dynamical difficulty adjustment in computer games.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126299374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Influence Map-based controllers for Ms. PacMan and the ghosts","authors":"J. Svensson, S. Johansson","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374164","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374164","url":null,"abstract":"Ms. Pac-Man, one of the classic arcade games has recently gained attention in the field of game AI through the yearly competitions of various kinds held at e.g. CIG. We have implemented an Influence Map-based controller for Ms. Pac-Man as well as for the ghosts within the game. We show that it is able to handle a number of various situations through the interesting behaviors emerging through the interplay of the different maps. It is also significantly better than the previous implementations based on similar techniques, such as potential fields.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125188954","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A binary classification approach for automatic preference modeling of virtual agents in Civilization IV","authors":"Marlos C. Machado, G. Pappa, L. Chaimowicz","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374151","url":null,"abstract":"Player Modeling tries to model players behaviors and characteristics during a game. When these are related to more abstract preferences, the process is normally called Preference Modeling. In this paper we infer Civilization IV's virtual agents preferences with classifiers based on support vector machines. Our vectors contain score indicators from agents gameplay, allowing us to predict preferences based on the indirect observations of actions. We model this task as a binary classification problem, allowing us to make more precise inference. In this sense, we leveraged previous approaches that also used kernel machines but relied on different preference levels. Using binary classification and parameter optimization, our method is able to predict some agents preferences with an accuracy of 100%. Moreover, it is also capable of generalizing to different agents, being able to predict preferences of agents that were not used in the training process.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114365509","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Interactively training first person shooter bots","authors":"M. McPartland, M. Gallagher","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374149","url":null,"abstract":"Interactive training is a technique that allows humans to guide a learning algorithm. This technique is well suited to training first person shooter bots as it allows game designers to iterate a range of behaviors in real-time. This paper investigates an initial attempt at allowing users to interact with the learning process of a reinforcement learning algorithm to create first person shooter bot behaviors. The results clearly show that it is possible to create different types of bot behaviors using the developed interactive training tool.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132516807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
D. Maggiorini, Antonio Nigro, L. Ripamonti, M. Trubian
{"title":"The Perfect Looting System: Looking for a Phoenix?","authors":"D. Maggiorini, Antonio Nigro, L. Ripamonti, M. Trubian","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374179","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374179","url":null,"abstract":"Massively Multiplayer Online (Role-Playing) Games (MMORPGs and MMOs) are highly complex socio-technical distributed systems. The thickly knitted web of relations among players is the backbone upon which their success (or failure) lies. For this reason, both game designers and managers should be aware of how - even the thinnest - features of the environment will impact on players. We can enlist among these apparently “minor” aspects Looting Systems (LSs), which help allocating valuable in-game objects, as fairly as possible, among the players. In the present work, we try to cast some light on the medium/long term effects of the adoption of different LSs on players' satisfaction (and hence on their “fidelity” to a specific game service). We adopt an agent-based approach to simulate the effects and drawbacks of LSs on different player bases (according to Bartle's player types), demonstrating that a relation among LSs and players' satisfaction with the game service could really exists, and that an appropriate choice of the LS could affect the distribution of player types in the game community, thus offering hints for reflection and further investigation to MMOs/MMORPGs developers.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"66 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132075063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
C. Bauckhage, K. Kersting, R. Sifa, Christian Thurau, Anders Drachen, Alessandro Canossa
{"title":"How players lose interest in playing a game: An empirical study based on distributions of total playing times","authors":"C. Bauckhage, K. Kersting, R. Sifa, Christian Thurau, Anders Drachen, Alessandro Canossa","doi":"10.1109/CIG.2012.6374148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2012.6374148","url":null,"abstract":"Analyzing telemetry data of player behavior in computer games is a topic of increasing interest for industry and research, alike. When applied to game telemetry data, pattern recognition and statistical analysis provide valuable business intelligence tools for game development. An important problem in this area is to characterize how player engagement in a game evolves over time. Reliable models are of pivotal interest since they allow for assessing the long-term success of game products and can provide estimates of how long players may be expected to keep actively playing a game. In this paper, we introduce methods from random process theory into game data mining in order to draw inferences about player engagement. Given large samples (over 250,000 players) of behavioral telemetry data from five different action-adventure and shooter games, we extract information as to how long individual players have played these games and apply techniques from lifetime analysis to identify common patterns. In all five cases, we find that the Weibull distribution gives a good account of the statistics of total playing times. This implies that an average player's interest in playing one of the games considered evolves according to a non-homogeneous Poisson process. Therefore, given data on the initial playtime behavior of the players of a game, it becomes possible to predict when they stop playing.","PeriodicalId":288052,"journal":{"name":"2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)","volume":"46 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120887448","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}