FDG 2019 - abstracts of the papers

fdg-2019.md

SESSION: Applied games and gameful design

Knowledge assessment: game for assessment of symptoms of child physical abuse Richard Zhao, Christopher R. Shelton, Melanie D. Hetzel-Riggin, Jordan LaRiccia, Gregory Louchart, Adam Meanor, Heather J. Risser Article No.: 1 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337747

Using serious games as a form of training and education has been a growing trend. While there has been research into the adaptation of games for training, assessment of user knowledge as a whole for the purpose of creating tailored training content has not been closely examined. In this paper, we propose a general framework for creating an assessment game and show how Knowledge Assessment can be used to guide the focus of subsequent training modules. Using our framework, we address the frustration and anxiety expressed by medical and nursing professionals about their lack of training regarding indicators of child physical abuse (CPA) in the United States. We develop the Computer Simulated Interactive Child Abuse Screening Tool (CSI-CAST), which contains scenarios in a serious game and uses assistive AI technologies to assess a group of users and discover features that are important in indicating the users' collective knowledge identifying CPA. A user study is conducted to show that CSI-CAST is easy to use and it functions to discover specific training needs.

Radical tunes: exploring the impact of music on memorization of stroke order in logographic writing systems Oleksandra Keehl, Edward Melcer Article No.: 2 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337764

Music and rhythm are powerful tools that can be employed to enhance learning and memory. While games are commonly utilized to aid in second language acquisition, few have explored the implications of sound on learner's ability to draw and remember logographic characters (such as those in Chinese hanzi, Japanese kanji and Korean hanja). We created Radical Tunes, a kanji drawing music game, to explore the impacts of incorporating music on players' ability to retain meaning and stoke order of several kanji. In this paper, we describe the design rationale for Radical Tunes, and present results from a pilot study comparing a music focused version of the game with one that uses non-musical sound effects. Results show that while both conditions improved players' short-term ability to remember/draw kanji, there were no significant differences in improvement between the conditions. However, the use of music did improve immersion---an important factor related to learning. This work has implications for designers of second language acquisition games, and how they can incorporate rhythm and music into their games to increase player engagement.

Gamifying psychological assessment: insights from gamifying the thematic apperception test Borna Fatehi, Christoffer Holmgård, Sam Snodgrass, Casper Harteveld Article No.: 3 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337737

Gamification and serious games have the capacity to increase engagement in often non-engaging contexts such as a test. In this study, we gamified a psychological test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), with the player motivation concepts of achievement, exploration, and social interactions. We used the platform Study-Crafter to implement our games and ran a study to test the effectiveness of this gamified psychological assessment. All participants completed both the standard version of the TAT and our gamified versions and rated their experience in each setting through self-reports. Our results show that the gamified versions of the TAT provided a more enjoyable and motivating experience than the standard version. We conclude that gamifying psychological tests has potential for increasing motivation in psychological assessments while questions of validity remain to be addressed.

Programming in game space: how to represent parallel programming concepts in an educational game Jichen Zhu, Katelyn Alderfer, Anushay Furqan, Jessica Nebolsky, Bruce Char, Brian Smith, Jennifer Villareale, Santiago Ontañón Article No.: 4 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337749

Concurrent and parallel programming (CPP) skills are increasingly important in today's world of parallel hardware. However, the conceptual leap from deterministic sequential programming to CPP is notoriously challenging to make. Our educational game Parallel is designed to support the learning of CPP core concepts through a game-based learning approach, focusing on the connection between gameplay and CPP. Through a 10-week user study (n 25) in an undergraduate concurrent programming course, the first empirical study for a CPP educational game, our results show that Parallel offers both CPP knowledge and student engagement. Furthermore, we provide a new framework to describe the design space for programming games in general.

What if we were twice as close to the sun?: findings from a science summer camp serving underrepresented youth Sherry Yi, H. Chad Lane, Ömer Delialioğlu Article No.: 5 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337762

Diversity has been a prevalent issue in the American STEM workforce for a number of years. Efforts to increase diversification have resulted in alternate learning spaces such as makerspaces, after school programs, and technology integrated curriculums. Our study, hosted at a non-profit organization serving underrepresented youth, leveraged the video game Minecraft (MC) as a way to engage summer campers in scientific concepts and inquiries over one week. Reoccurring themes from interviews include familial rules on technology use at home, engaging with STEM in a novel way, and a love for building and creating within MC. We discuss our insight into the discoveries and challenges of these types of STEM-oriented program that takes place in informal settings.

Expertise and engagement: re-designing citizen science games with players' minds in mind Josh Aaron Miller, Uttkarsh Narayan, Matthew Hantsbarger, Seth Cooper, Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 6 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337735

Many studies have already shown that games can be a useful tool to make boring or difficult tasks more engaging. However, with serious game design being a relatively nascent field, such experiences can still be hard to learn and not very motivating. In this paper, we explore the use of learning and motivation frameworks to improve player experience in the well-known citizen science game Foldit. Using Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and Self Determination Theory (SDT), we developed six interface and mechanical changes to the tutorial levels in Foldit designed to increase engagement and retention. We tested these features with new players of Foldit and collected both behavioral data, using game metrics, and prior experience data, using self-report measures. This study offers three major contributions: (1) we document the process of operationalizing CLT and SDT as new game features, a unique methodology not used in game design previously; (2) the user interface, specifically the level selection screen, significantly impacts how players progress through the game; and (3) a player's expertise, whether from prior domain knowledge or prior gaming experience, increases their engagement. We discuss both implications of these findings as well as how these implementations can generalize to other designs.

SESSION: Artificial intelligence

A model for socially intelligent merchants Miguel Oliveira, Pedro A. Santos Article No.: 7 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337729

In this work we propose and test a new model for socially intelligent merchants to be used in Role Playing Games. The objective is to enhance the player's experience in terms of immersion when interacting with merchants and increase the merchants' believability as Non-Player Characters, while minimizing the authoring effort. The model is based on the CIF architecture, with merchant specific components added. The model allows the creation of different kinds of merchants based on their traits that convey different personalities with an arrangement of different possible interactions, all this without much effort. An abbreviated version of the model was implemented and tested in the game Conan Exiles. The results were very positive, with merchants using our model proving to be significantly more enjoyable and believable when compared with a merchant without the model. In the end, there was an almost unanimous preference by the players for interacting with the merchants that had our model in relation to the one without it.

Analyzing action games: a hybrid systems approach Yegeta Zeleke, Joseph C. Osborn, Ricardo G. Sanfelice Article No.: 8 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337757

Design support tools benefit from rich information about games' emergent behavior. Inventing successful AI players for particular games can help producing some of this information, but this is both labor intensive and limited in that it can generally only reveal that a solution exists and not say that no solution exists or that certain classes of solution exist. We show a generic method for posing and answering feasible-path, optimal-path, and reachable-space queries in action games, and we devise a measure of game level difficulty. We accomplish all this by encoding action videogame characters as hybrid dynamical systems, using Flappy Bird and Super Mario as case studies.

Enhancing story generation with the semantic web Eric LaBouve, Erik Miller, Foaad Khosmood Article No.: 9 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337742

In story or character driven games, in-game stories are usually manually authored in advance. As the complexity of interactions in games increases, the quantity of hand-crafted text typically follows. Designing stories and composing content by hand is a laborious and time consuming process that if automated, would speed up game production and lower development costs. In this paper, we present a mixed initiative tool to help generalize and enhance context free grammars (CFGs) for story generation. The tool is designed to take as input a story generating grammar in addition to generic keywords for people, places and other various metrics in order to control the output text. The tool is knowledgeable about a wide array of topics because it leverages the Semantic Web in order to extrapolate more details and related information from the user supplied content. As a result, generated text will contain genuinely new information, descriptions of characters and locations that were never written by the author. Although the general structure of a story or dialogue is somewhat fixed by the nature of grammar rules, the resulting text can be geared towards a variety of user inputs and can include details that may surprise designers. The tool is evaluated by a group of 15 individuals in a user study to gauge the practicality of using Semantic Web technologies for procedural text generation. The study concludes that using the Semantic Web is an effective aid for grammar based text generation. We discuss our system, the user study and share thoughts on future work.

Automatic generation of tower defense levels using PCG Simon Liu, Li Chaoran, Li Yue, Ma Heng, Hou Xiao, Shen Yiming, Wang Licong, Chen Ze, Guo Xianghao, Lu Hengtong, Du Yu, Tang Qinting Article No.: 10 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337723

Tower defense is a popular subgenre of real-time strategy game requiring detailed level design and difficulty balancing to create an enjoyable player experience. Because level production and testing are both time-consuming and labor-intensive, we propose and implement a framework to automate the process. We first analyze the three main components, or "building blocks", of the popular tower defense game Kingdom Rush: Frontiers (KRF), i.e. road maps, tower locations and monster sequences. We then automatically create new building blocks in the style of the original game, utilizing techniques from Procedural Content Generation (PCG), and assemble them to create new levels. We also add a fourth block: automated testing via a Monte Carlo search algorithm, to ensure the generated content is playable. We focus on KRF because it is a popular video game in the tower defense genre, and highlights some of the challenges of designing appropriate PCG and playtesting algorithms for a commercial video game.

From caveman to gentleman: a CiF-based social interaction model applied to conan exiles Luís Morais, João Dias, Pedro A. Santos Article No.: 11 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337746

Even though modern video games present rich storytelling and high graphical fidelity, they are still lacking in rich non-scripted NPC social interactions. In this work we present an extension of the Comme il Faut (CiF) and CiF-CK social interaction models, where we added emotions and a emotion appraisal process based on the OCC model of emotion and also added a belief system that models the social network values that the NPCs expect regarding the other NPCs' relationships. A version of the new model, which we named Comme il Faut - Exiles (CiF-Ex), was implemented in the AAA game Conan Exiles using their modding tools and validated. The results were noteworthy: the users enjoyed the game more and tended to spend more time near CiF-Ex enabled NPCs. The majority of the users preferred CiF-Ex NPCs, versus the vanilla NPCs. CiF-Ex NPCs were perceived as more believable and less predictable.

Using rating arrays to estimate score distributions for player-versus-level matchmaking Anurag Sarkar, Seth Cooper Article No.: 12 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337758

Rating systems (like Elo and Glicko-2) have previously been used for predicting the expected score that a player will achieve on a level. We present an approach that predicts not a single score, but an approximate cumulative distribution function over possible scores. This approach assigns each level an array of multiple ratings for different score thresholds. Our long-term goal is twofold: first, to dynamically change level difficulty for each player by using this CDF to tailor the target score required to complete a level; second, in human computation games (HCGs), to identify players capable of setting new high scores that could correspond to improved solutions to underlying tasks. To move towards this goal, we explore the rating array approach using two datasets: one gathered from the HCG Paradox, and one generated from idealized players and levels. We examine the accuracy of the CDF and the expected scores it predicts, as well as its use in serving levels to players who could set new high scores.

Efficient choice enumeration for narrative world design Justus Robertson, Arnav Jhala, R. Michael Young Article No.: 13 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337736

An open challenge for AI in digital games is narrative experience management, the problem of automatically directing virtual characters in an interactive story to produce specific narrative effects for human participants. One important aspect of interactive narrative quality is participant choice, which provides the central distinction between interactive and linear storytelling. Most experience management work identifies storytelling patterns an agent should value or guides participants through high-value story trajectories. However, the types and quality of choices available in an interactive story are influenced not only by a model of narrative and specific story character actions, but also the world design that affords situations and actions. In this paper, we present a method for generating all unique, accessible choice combinations for a story world as a first step towards experience-driven interactive narrative world design. We benchmark the approach against several baselines and discuss its use as a tool for human and automated world designers.

Wait a second: playing Hanabi without giving hints Markus Eger, Daniel Gruss Article No.: 14 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337744

Hanabi is a cooperative card game in which communication plays a key role. The game provides an interesting challenge for AI agents, because the game state is only partially observable, and the game limits what players can tell each other. This limit on communication channels is similar to a common scenario in system security research, and has been researched extensively in that context, for example by bypassing a system's isolation by establishing a covert communication channel. Such channels can be established through anything that the sending party can influence and the receiving party can observe, such as photonic emission, resource contention, or latency. In this paper, we present Hanabi agents that utilize timing as a covert channel so effectively that they can eschew the communicative actions provided by the game entirely. In addition to a thorough evaluation of the effectiveness of our approach, and a comparison to other Hanabi agents, we provide its context in the area of security, and an outlook on how it could be related to human behavior in future work.

Lume: a system for procedural story generation Stacey Mason, Ceri Stagg, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 15 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337759

Procedural storytelling offers immense promise for games to offer more reactive narrative experiences that feel more deeply tailored to players' decisions. To date, interactive narrative systems have tended toward either a large emergent possibility space with less focus on narrative structure, or toward greater structure with smaller possibility spaces. In this paper, we introduce Lume, a system for procedural narrative generation that combines the best of these two approaches through a novel combinatorial scene architecture in which storylet scenes are comprised of parameterized node-trees. We detail how the system works and discuss how it moves toward creating reactive interactive narratives that are both dynamic and coherent.

Making CNNs for video parsing accessible: event extraction from DOTA2 gameplay video using transfer, zero-shot, and network pruning Zijin Luo, Matthew Guzdial, Mark Riedl Article No.: 16 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337755

The ability to extract sequences of game events for high-resolution e-sport games has traditionally required access to the game's engine. This serves as a barrier to groups who don't possess this access. It is possible to apply deep learning to derive these logs from gameplay video, but it requires computational power that serves as an additional barrier. These groups would benefit from access to these logs, such as small e-sport tournament organizers who could better visualize gameplay to inform both audience and commentators. In this paper we present a combined solution to reduce the required computational resources and time to apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract events from e-sport gameplay videos. This solution consists of techniques to train a CNN faster and methods to execute predictions more quickly. This expands the types of machines capable of training and running these models, which in turn extends access to extracting game logs with this approach. We evaluate the approaches in the domain of DOTA2, one of the most popular e-sports. Our results demonstrate our approach outperforms standard backpropagation baselines.

Enhancing wave function collapse with design-level constraints Arunpreet Sandhu, Zeyuan Chen, Joshua McCoy Article No.: 17 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337752

Wave Function Collapse (WFC) is a non-backtracking, greedy search algorithm that is commonly known for its ability to take an example image and generate similar images. Since its inception, technical artists have explored the algorithm's extensibility and usability through various implementations spanning from 3D world generation to poetry creation. However, there has been no integration of design constraints into the generative process. In this paper, we explore WFC as a constraint satisfaction solver to integrate design principles and practices by modifying components within the algorithm. First, we extend the local constraint reasoning by incorporating non-local constraints as well as upper and lower bounds. Next, we further manipulate the generative space by introducing weight recalculation and dependencies. Lastly, we evaluate our design-focused variant of WFC against the original implementation to examine the associated costs in computational time and memory usage. In summary, this paper describes a technical implementation of integrating design constraints into WFC and analyzes the computational trade-offs.

SESSION: Computer-human interaction and player experience

Teamwork and adaptation in games (TAG): a survey to gauge teamwork: a survey to gauge teamwork) Casper Harteveld, Erica Kleinman, Paola Rizzo, Dylan Schouten, Truong Huy Nguyen, Samuel Liberty, Wade Kimbrough, Paul Fombelle, Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 18 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337731

Teamwork is becoming an important element of gameplay. Many games nowadays incorporate teamwork in one form or another. As a result, many game researchers have investigated aspects of teamwork. However, we have yet to develop effective surveys to gauge how people strategize or problem solve together within different games, and how such games enable these activities. In this paper, we propose the Teamwork and Adaptation in Games (TAG) survey. We developed this survey using theories of team adaptation, a process of how teams work together and adapt their strategies to changes in environments. Through three separate studies, the TAG survey was used to gauge team adaptation. Our results show that the TAG survey is an effective instrument allowing us to gauge team adaptation in different game environments. We further found that the instrument can be effectively used to compare games.

A design framework for playful wearables Oğuz 'Oz' Buruk, Katherine Isbister, Tess Tanenbaum Article No.: 19 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337733

Deployment of wearables for games has attracted the interest of designers and researchers both in academia and industry. However, few of these projects treat wearables as an integral part of the gameplay, often considering them as an extension of the central on-screen experience. While preliminary forays into wearable play show promise, we see a need for a rigorous design framework to illuminate the possibilities for the future of wearables for playful interaction design. In this paper we propose a Design Framework for Playful Wearables stemming from our extensive research and hands-on experience in leading four long-term game research projects incorporating wearables. We divide our framework into three high-level categories: the performative, the social and the interactive. We contend that this design space can be both a design tool for creators of wearable playful activities, as well as an analytical lens for evaluating existing wearable systems.

Understanding user needs in videogame moment retrieval Barrett R. Anderson, Adam M. Smith Article No.: 20 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337728

Videogames are a rich domain for scholarship, and their dynamic content makes them a new and unique challenge for information retrieval (IR). Recent work has made it possible to cite specific moments in a videogame (like pages in a book), but currently finding those moments to cite is laborious because there are no videogame moment search engines. We conducted an in-depth interview study with ten users across a variety of user profiles: developers, educators, speedrunners, scholars, and streamers. From these interviews, we identify the unique needs of each user profile for retrieving moments from videogames. We outline implications for future research in retrieval and design implications for new tools focused on interactive media.

SESSION: Game design and development

Towards expressive input for character dialogue in digital games Nick Junius, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 21 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337726

While there has been work in interactive narrative built using theory and practice from theater, it has mostly focused on the structure of narrative and how a player's interaction with the plot alters that structure. How a player interacts has usually been tied to common game interaction paradigms. There is an understanding that a videogame player exists somewhere between an audience member and a stage actor---but rarely are players allowed to express themselves in a manner similar to an actor. This paper argues that the acting and directing knowledge of theater is a potentially bountiful resource for designing player and NPC interactions. To illustrate this, the paper presents a literature review of theatrical methodology, its existing relationship to games, and a survey of projects in the interactive narrative and character interaction spaces. The chosen theater practices provide a useful basis for a new type of interaction between players and non-player characters. Additionally, particularly when looking at acting practices, their major concerns with the relationship between character and actor provide useful language to describe and further explore the relationship between the player and their avatar. Finally, this paper proposes one possible way of building systems to encourage new modes of play and alter the relationship between designers, systems, and players.

Game postmortems vs. developer Reddit AMAs: computational analysis of developer communication Chien Lu, Jaakko Peltonen, Timo Nummenmaa Article No.: 22 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337727

Postmortems and Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) threads represent communications of game developers through two different channels about their game development experiences, culture, processes, and practices. We carry out a quantitative text mining based comprehensive analysis of online available postmortems and AMA threads from game developers over multiple years. We find and analyze underlying topics from the postmortems and AMAs as well as their variation among the data sources and over time. The analysis is done based on structural topic modeling, a probabilistic modeling technique for text mining. The extracted topics reveal differing and common interests as well as their evolution of prevalence over time in the two text sources. We have found that postmortems put more emphasis on detail-oriented development aspects as well as technically-oriented game design problems whereas AMAs feature a wider variety of discussion topics that are related to a more general game development process, game-play and game-play experience related game design. The prevalences of the topics also evolve differently over time in postmortems versus AMAs.

Player interaction in narrative games: structure and narrative progression mechanics Elin Carstensdottir, Erica Kleinman, Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 23 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337730

When studying the impact of interactive narratives, especially in high impact, sensitive domains such as education and health, it is important that the narrative design as a whole is reported in sufficient detail to allow for analysis and replication. However, the design of interactive narrative applications is often insufficiently documented and reported, despite being a central component and, often, a focus of study. This is due, in part, to a lack of a common lexicon that allows designers and practitioners to describe and compare their designs. This paper examines interaction design in interactive narrative games, specifically structure and progression mechanics, from the perspective of establishing common ground between designer and player. Using the interaction model for interactive narratives to guide our analysis, we found patterns of structure and narrative progression mechanics that offer insight into commercial design practices, which can inform and guide interaction design choices for narrative games.

StoryAssembler: an engine for generating dynamic choice-driven narratives Jacob Garbe, Max Kreminski, Ben Samuel, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas Article No.: 24 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337732

Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form of interactive storytelling that have been around for many years. But as long as this form has existed, it has grappled with a persistent design problem: consistently presenting choices that feel both effective and relevant. Brute force can achieve the desired effect, but usually at the cost of prohibitively high authorial burden. To tackle this, generative approaches, such as Mawhorter's Dunyazad, facilitate authoring procedural choice content for reuse and recombination. However, many such systems, while successful on technical levels, have yet to to be used to author large enough structures to support a full game, and require a high technical threshold for authors to use. To further development in this space, we present StoryAssembler, an open source generative narrative system that creates dynamic choice-driven narratives. It formed a critical part of Emma's Journey, an interactive narrative game, the initial version of which was collaboratively authored by a team of six writers. In the course of the game's creation, useful authoring patterns and design lessons were learned, as well as techniques that made the system approachable for first-time users.

Game design frameworks: where do we start? Zoë O'Shea, Jonathan Freeman Article No.: 25 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337753

Attempts to improve our understanding and application of game design principles has seen a rise in the creation of "frameworks" for use in industry and academic study over time. A number of frameworks have come into popular practice and while there exists a "common sense" understanding of what a framework in game design might be, there are limited attempts to formally add to their definition through discourse. This paper seeks to address problems that may have led to this gap in our knowledge about frameworks. We also outline a selection of frameworks that we believe to be of use for developers, and present the questions that arose from early attempts to define and compare these frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other papers that attempt to address these basic concerns regarding frameworks in game design, and only two other surveys of some of the various frameworks available. Through our discussion and conclusion, we propose that further research should be done in the interests of finding an appropriate measure for comparing frameworks, as well as suggest potential methodologies to use. We stress the value of a process of discussion regarding frameworks, over the output of a strict definition. It is our hope that readers will find this paper a thought-provoking and useful resource for their own research and practice.

Like PEAS in PoDS: the player, environment, agents, system framework for the personalization of digital systems Sam Snodgrass, Omid Mohaddesi, Jack Hart, Guillermo Romera Rodriguez, Christoffer Holmgård, Casper Harteveld Article No.: 26 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337756

Personalization has been explored in the context of games in many forms (e.g., dynamic difficulty adjustment, affective video games, adaptive systems, experience-driven PCG, etc.). The majority of techniques used in these fields have relied on data-driven or manual methods for identifying game components to modify for personalization. We propose a theoretical framework for identifying and categorizing low-level components of games that can be personalized. In this paper we first perform a review of game design frameworks and personalization approaches. We then systematically identify the aspects of games which have been utilized for personalization and which components have been identified in game design frameworks as building blocks of games. We synthesize the identified components into categories of game elements. We then propose PEAS, a theoretical framework for personalization through the adaptation of the Player, Environment, Agents, and System.

SuBViS: the use of subjunctive visual programming environments for exploring alternatives in game development Daniel MacCormick, Loutfouz Zaman Article No.: 27 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337740

Game development is a naturally iterative process where many ideas are tested and prototyped before final decisions are made. Given the increased usage of visual scripting systems in game development recently, it is apparent that these tools must be able to support every aspect of this process. One aspect that is not well captured is the exploration of alternatives. SuBViS was developed as a solution to this problem. It is a visual scripting system for exploring parallel ideas in game development through the use of alternatives at graph and node levels. These two levels of exploring alternatives can be combined or used separately. This paper presents a use case example, which demonstrates how SuBViS can improve workflow and communication between team members. It also discusses a small-scale user study and the results obtained therein. SuBViS was developed on top of Unreal Engine's existing Blueprint Visual Scripting system.

Red or blue pill: fostering identification and transportation through dialogue choices in RPGs Jason T Bowey, Maximilian A Friehs, Regan L Mandryk Article No.: 28 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337734

Through free choice, individuals can exert control over the environment and experience agency. Research has suggested that tailoring aspects of choice to a player's type can provide benefits; however, commercial Role Playing Games (RPGs) generally provide static opposing options from a spectrum (e.g., paragon versus renegade). To inform the design of choices in RPGs, we conducted three studies comparing configurations of dialogue choices across the morality spectrum in an RPG prototype. Study 1 compared two polar (opposing) choices with two moral or two immoral choices. Study 2 contrasted polar choices with similar choices tailored to the player's morality, modelled from their initial 10 decisions. Study 3 compared polar choices with two tailored and one opposing choice. Our results consistently show that including the opposing choice is important to a player's identification with their character, even when we can reliably predict the decision that they will make.

The computational puzzle design framework: a design guide for games teaching computational thinking Xina Jiang, Casper Harteveld, Xinyuan Huang, Anthony Y. H. Fung Article No.: 29 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337768

Games have been designed to foster children's computational thinking (CT) skills, which is widely recognized as a key ability that should be mastered in this computing-driven era. Because learning coding skills is cognitively difficult and uninvolving for novices and it is recommended to learn CT concepts first, many educational games have been developed to teach CT in a non-coding environment. However, despite the breadth of such games and the demand for it, little is known about how to design such games or why such games are designed in a particular way. To address this gap, this paper presents a design framework that describes the building blocks for developing (non-coding) gameplay elements in games teaching CT. The framework focuses specifically on computational problem-solving because this is where games can specifically aid with. We illustrate the design framework through LittleWorld, a mobile game that teaches CT concepts through insects.

SESSION: Game education

The building blocks of an educational esports league: lessons from year one in orange county high schools Alexander Cho, A. M. Tsaasan, Constance Steinkuehler Article No.: 30 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337738

In the 2017-2018 school year, 38 student teams from 25 high schools across Orange County, California, competed in weekly tournament play of the multiplayer arena battle video game League of Legends, culminating in a championship playoff in one of the first region-wide high school esports leagues in the US. Our team performed a formative evaluation of this League's first year, with special attention to logistical concerns as well as any potential alignments between esports and learning. Our team engaged student League players (n=39) and teachers (n=11) who managed their school's teams in focus groups and observation at six schools; we conducted focus groups with experienced player-coaches (n=5) who supported teams, and one-on-one interviews with parents (n=10). The paper identifies organic learning opportunities during league play such as critical analysis, communication, research skills, and social emotional learning; techniques to clearing administrative hurdles; and structural socioeconomic equity issues that the leadership team may not have anticipated. The paper incorporates recommendations for these areas and critically situates them for future deployment with attention to maximizing learning potential with equity and access for all.

Using applied cognitive load theory and difficulty analysis for educational game design for understanding and transference of literacy skills in adults Myque Ouellette, Lauren Breeding, Corey Clark Article No.: 31 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337725

Using the adult literacy game Codex: The Lost Words of Atlantis, an XPRIZE grand prize winner, as a development test, this article establishes a data-informed design process using gameplay curve analysis to control difficulty and increase accessibility to the target audiences of educational games. The process uses guidelines based in Cognitive Load Theory and fundamental digital game design principles of flow, skill progression, interest curves, and pacing to calculate and analyze the baseline curve of existing gameplay. Based on this analysis, sections are targeted for replacement or adjustment, and run through stages of design and review against the initial goals in iterative loops until passing on to final implementation.

Given known variables of target audience skill, quantifiable difficulty measurements for existing gameplay, and the desired skills taught and tested, designers can use this process to analyze and adjust gameplay for increased accessibility. By controlling the difficulty of gameplay, designers ensure that players are able to learn and practice skills adequately, laying the foundation for further in-game and real-world challenges. While this article focuses on educational games and adult literacy, this process is broadly applicable to any educational or entertainment games that desire greater control over gameplay curve progression.

Goal-based progression synthesis in a korean learning game Shuhan Wang, Brandon Cohen, Sixian Yi, Jung Yun Park, Nicholas Teo, Erik Andersen Article No.: 32 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337745

Designing educational games is difficult, and ideally designers should be able to rely on tools that take some of the burden off them by generating content automatically. Previous work in automatic level generation and sequencing for educational games has primarily focused on achieving a gradual increase of difficulty. However, engagement often comes from a sense of accomplishment after completing hard tasks [27]. For this reason, many games feature "boss levels" that are more intense. In this paper, we propose that a good progression should be goal-based, meaning that it should build up towards some hard tasks (goals) as soon as possible to create a sense of satisfaction. To achieve this, we propose a graph-based algorithm for automatically synthesizing goal-based learning progressions of user-specific length. We also introduce Katchi, a Korean language learning puzzle game that is designed to be highly parameterizable, to evaluate our synthesized progression. In an evaluation of a Korean learning game with 248 participants, our synthesized progression performed similarly to an expert-designed progression in terms of both our engagement and learning metrics, demonstrating that our algorithm is capable of automatically synthesizing goal-based progressions that are comparable to the manually created progressions.

Trans-pacific project-based learning: game production curriculum development Adam Ruch Article No.: 33 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337724

This paper describes a curriculum-development project carried out in two distinct phases, first in Australia and second in the United States at a private, post-secondary institution in the creative arts. The specific example program is in game design and development. The paper will explore pedagogical aims and objectives, as well as the challenges of devising and implementing curricula in two different cultural and regulatory contexts, despite apparent similarities.

Building persistence through failure: the role of challenge in video games Craig G. Anderson, Kathryn Campbell, Constance Steinkuehler Article No.: 34 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337741

Some video games create challenging environments that presume that players will often fail as part of developing the skills and knowledge they need to progress through the game. Psychology has a rich history of studying the ways that individuals react towards failure, including mastery orientation. Mastery oriented individuals are characterized by positive reactions to failure, such as renewed effort, heightened affect, and positive, affirming language. However, the challenging environments of which these video games are comprised have not yet been investigated fully in their potential impact on how players react to failure. In an initial exploration, we surveyed 928 undergraduates at a major university in the Pacific United States on their gameplay experience and attitudes towards challenge and failure. Analyses partially replicate previous findings and show that players who are more attracted to challenge in video games report higher mastery orientation. While this suggests that challenge in video games has some association with positive reactions to failure, further analyses are warranted to understand how challenge in video games influence player reactions and the impact this may have beyond of the game.

SESSION: Games and culture

Building and sustaining large, long-term online communities: family business and gamifying the game Nathaniel Poor Article No.: 35 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337760

This work examines how leaders of guilds, a type of community found in many online multiplayer games, build and sustain large online groups of 400 to 500 people, considerably larger than previous work has suggested is possible. Using a sequential mixed-method design that focused on interviewing guild leaders of large guilds in the game The Elder Scrolls Online, several items were realized. Guild leaders found community management tools and methods unremarkable, reflecting the importance of their ease of use. Leaders need the ability to exclude unwanted persons and perhaps to include wanted members. Non-redundant channels of communication are needed, these included ephemeral voice for immediacy, and text and photos for a longer-lasting record of communication. Keeping members active increases engagement, but members, as human beings, only have so much capacity for strong ties: many in large groups will be loosely tied to others in the group.

Necklines and 'naughty bits': constructing and regulating bodies in live streaming community guidelines Amanda L. L. Cullen, Bonnie Ruberg Article No.: 36 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337754

This paper performs a qualitative analysis of the community guidelines of video game live streaming platforms like Twitch, Mixer, and Caffeine. Live streaming is becoming an increasingly prominent part of the contemporary landscape around video games, game cultures, and the games industry [34]. Recent research into video game live streaming has explored its financial structures [18], its potential as a platform for self-expression [10], and its novel affordances for communication [12]. However, community guidelines also play a significant, behind-the-scenes role in shaping live streaming practices. These guidelines, which shift over time in response to controversies and changing notions of acceptable behavior, set standards for what types of content can be streamed and how streamers present themselves on-camera. Here we assemble, compare, and interpret the community guidelines of a number of top live streaming sites. Our focus is on how these guidelines construct and regulate "legitimate" bodies - both the bodies of streamers and the bodies of in-game characters - especially the sexualized bodies of women. In varying ways, each set of community guidelines attempts to establish rules for how women's bodies may or may not be presented on screen. Often these guidelines measure and quantify the body, for example by dictating precisely how high the neckline of a streamer's shirt must be. Through our analysis, we articulate the unspoken yet active cultural work performed by these community guidelines, which try yet ultimately fail to render a definition of the sexualized body in precise, concrete terms. This research also offers new insights into larger issues of video games and gender. It points toward anxieties about the visibility of women's bodies in gaming spaces and demonstrates that, although live streaming platforms like Twitch present their community guidelines as tools for protecting their community members, these same guidelines often enact the further marginalization of women and other diverse streamers.

Leveling the playing field: fairness in AI versus human game benchmarks Rodrigo Canaan, Christoph Salge, Julian Togelius, Andy Nealen Article No.: 37 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337750

From the beginning of the history of AI, there has been interest in games as a platform of research. As the field developed, human-level competence in complex games became a target researchers worked to reach. Only relatively recently has this target been finally met for traditional tabletop games such as Backgammon, Chess and Go. This prompted a shift in research focus towards electronic games, which provide unique new challenges. As is often the case with AI research, these results are liable to be exaggerated or mis-represented by either authors or third parties. The extent to which these game benchmarks constitute "fair" competition between human and AI is also a matter of debate. In this paper, we review statements made by reseachers and third parties in the general media and academic publications about these game benchmark results. We analyze what a fair competition would look like and suggest a taxonomy of dimensions to frame the debate of fairness in game contests between humans and machines. Eventually, we argue that there is no completely fair way to compare human and AI performance on a game.

"Do you work for aperture science?": researching and finding the gamer identity in a minecraft community for autistic children Kathryn E. Ringland Article No.: 38 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337766

Much of the scholarly work for and about individuals with disabilities focused on accessibility and on disability identity. In this ethnographic study of a Minecraft community for children and youth with autism, Autcraft, I analyze community members' intersecting identities of gamer and autistic. I also describe the role of gender-identity as it impacts how youth explore and express their other identities. This work shows that autistic is only one facet of the community members' lives and that they consider themselves gamers as part of their core identity. I discuss the similarities in mainstream discourse about autism and gaming and the importance of approaching marginalized gaming communities with an intersectional lens. The contribution of this work points to how these complicated, intersecting identities affect how we, as researchers, should approach gaming communities in future work.

But does pikachu love you?: reproductive labor in casual and hardcore games Anastasia Salter, Mel Stanfill, Anne Sullivan Article No.: 39 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337739

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and "core" series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let's Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let's Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game's reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and "cuteness." Placing this discourse alongside the game's own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of "grinding" demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise's overarching narrative and core values-a set of values that inherently conflicts with the "hardcore" gamer mentality of play.

"I never gave up": engagement with playable characters and esports players of overwatch Tanja Välisalo, Maria Ruotsalainen Article No.: 40 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337769

Esports phenomena have grown rapidly in recent years, and so has research on the topic. Some of the research has also addressed esports fandom (see e.g. Taylor 2012). Nevertheless, studies comparing and contrasting how players and fans engage with the game and the esports based on that game are scarce. This study compares and contrasts how players and fans engage with playable game characters and esports players. The paper draws on previous research in fan studies, sports fandom and esports to examine the relationships of players and fans of the videogame Overwatch (Blizzard Entertainment 2016) with the fictional heroes of the game as well as with their favorite professional players in the newly started Overwatch League. We analyse how these relationships are articulated by fans and players, and pay attention to emerging similarities and differences.

The findings show that personality is deemed important for engagement with both, game characters and esports players. In addition, gender and sexual orientation emerged as important factors. By contrast, nationality was deemed important for engagement with esports players, but not with player characters. Further research should concentrate on the connections between esports and identity politics, as well as player characters and identity construction.

SESSION: Player modeling

The trails of Just Cause 2: spatio-temporal player profiling in open-world games Myat Aung, Simon Demediuk, Yuan Sun, Ye Tu, Yu Ang, Siva Nekkanti, Shantanu Raghav, Diego Klabjan, Rafet Sifa, Anders Drachen Article No.: 41 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337765

Behavioral profiling of players in digital games is a key challenge in game analytics, representing a particular challenge in Open-World Games. These games are characterized by large virtual worlds and few restrictions on player affordances. In these games, incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of player behavior is necessary when profiling behavior, as these dimensions are important to the playing experience. We present analyses that apply cluster analysis and the DEDICOM decompositional model to profile the behavior of more than 5,000 players of the major commercial title Just Cause 2 integrating both spatio-temporal trails and behavioral metrics. The application of DEDICOM to profile the spatio-temporal behavior of players is demonstrated for the purpose of analysing the entire play history of Just Cause 2 players, but also for the more detailed analysis of a single mission. This showcases the applicability of spatio-temporal profiling to condense player behavior across large sample sizes, across different scales of investigation. The method presented here provides a means to build profiles of player activity in game environments with high degrees of freedom across different scales of analysis - from a small segment to the entire game.

SESSION: Theory, history and criticism of games

Roguelike ancestry network visualisation: insights from the roguelike community Xavier Ho, Marcus Carter Article No.: 42 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337761

Idea networks are inherently illustrative of the domain knowledge they seek to capture. They provide pathways to retrace known paths, and to explore the unknown. In this study, we conceptualised an idea network of 639 roguelike games, using data collected from RogueBasin and other sources, and conducted a user study for designer insight. Study participants interacted with three idea network visualisations that support exploration of design influence, accompanied by a brief historical context of roguelike games, and our design process of visualisations. The study uncovered 6 classes of insights from game developers: thinking in networks, insights on data consistency, accessibility and usability, visualisation preferences, exploring related games, and data contributions from the community. The study is limited by the data sources available about design influences, acknowledging that idea networks are only a partial representation of the full picture, which cannot be known. However, this paper shows that even a partial idea network can be useful for exploring the ancestry of roguelikes and their design influences. It also showed how idea networks can facilitate knowledge sharing through online conversations and new lines of inquiry.

Order-fulfillment games: an analysis of games about serving customers Mike Treanor, Mark J. Nelson Article No.: 43 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337767

Consider the set of games, which we'll call order-fulfillment games, where the player fulfills customers' orders in a food-service setting under time pressure. We will use BurgerTime (1982), Tapper (1983), Diner Dash (2004), and Overcooked (2016) as examples. We argue that, although these games don't form a genre per se, they form a coherent taxonomic grouping defined by their core game loop, thematic elements, and typical player experiences. That these games share similarities may seem obvious, but we have found it illuminating to dig into precisely how this grouping is constituted, where its boundaries lie, and how it overlaps with well-recognized game genres. Besides analyzing this grouping for its own sake, a secondary contribution of this paper is as a case study in applying two analytical tools that have been proposed but little applied: Lessard's high-level design pattern formations and Sicart's version of the core game loop.

The psychological reality of procedural rhetoric Barrett R. Anderson, Christopher R. Karzmark, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 44 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337751

Game scholars make arguments that depend on the idea that games are capable of conveying meaning and making arguments via their mechanics, an information channel unique to games (and other forms of system-driven media) which Bogost has termed "procedural rhetoric." This concept is not intended to just be an interpretive technique for experts, but is also meant to describe the way the general player population experiences games. However, there has never (to our knowledge) been any attempt to use the tools of psychology to ascertain whether procedural rhetoric is a psychological reality for players in general and, if so, under what circumstances and in which ways it is experienced. This paper reports on the first steps in such an investigation. We found (a) that procedural rhetoric has psychological reality, with players accurately understanding that two games meant to have arguments have them, and the purely abstract game we included did not; (b) the understanding of procedural rhetoric appears to be strongly shaped by accompanying media, with the more abstract of the rhetorical games we studied much less clearly understood; and (c) as with any media, even when audiences understand the goal of a procedural rhetoric argument, the impact on their thoughts and feelings may not be as authors intend.

Building worlds together: understanding collaborative co-creation of game worlds Devi Acharya, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 45 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337748

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of games as sites of collaborative game world creation. By this, we mean the processes in games by which players take on a dual role as player within the game world and maker of the game world, sharing authorship of the world and its design with the game's designers and other players. We explore several examples of games featuring game world co-creation at the core of their gameplay, and use this to create a model for understanding the commonalities across these various games and how they facilitate this collaborative process. By examining similar structures in the design and play of these games, we can better understand how to identify this process in existing games and how to better create games that allow for this in the future.

SESSION: Virtual, augmented and mixed reality

Enhancing subject matter assessments utilizing augmented reality and serious game techniques Brian Holtkamp, Mohammed Alshair, Daniel Biediger, Michael Wilson, Chang Yun, Kyungki Kim Article No.: 46 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337743

In this paper, we utilize the Microsoft HoloLens, a wearable augmented-reality (AR) device, to investigate how well an AR-based assessment tool measures a student's comprehension of, skill in, and aptitude for a given subject matter. We added assessment capabilities to a serious game prototype built in collaboration with Construction Management faculty for their Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) safety course. In an effort to verify if these assessment elements are effective, we hosted a trial with sixteen university students who were enrolled in the OSHA safety course.

The trial consisted of a traditional pen-and-paper exam and an AR-based assessment. The AR-based assessment required the students to identify unsafe situations of virtually simulated workers, construction equipment, and/or vehicles in an AR diorama of an active construction site. We selected OSHA topics from eight categories ranging from proper ladder usage on the work site to workers wearing the correct protective equipment for where they are and what they're doing.

We find that 1.) students who performed well on a paper-based assessment also performed well within the AR-based assessment tool, 2.) students and faculty considered the AR trial more comprehensive and representative of knowledge, and 3.) user feedback reinforced the visual and interactive benefits of the AR over the paper-based exam. This trial shows promising results to adapt serious games and AR assessments into Computer Science and interdisciplinary subject matters that rely on visualization and spatial understanding.

Mind tricks for presence Daniel Sjölie, Sebastian Badylak Article No.: 47 doi>10.1145/3337722.3337763

As virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR) technology moves steadily towards general availability accessible descriptions of the surrounding theory is desirable. An initial focus on high-level concepts can provide common language for diverse teams, including artists, designers and engineers, helping them to quickly get a sense of basic principles and gain a familiarity with related research for further study.

The concepts of synchronized reality and grounded simulation are introduced as helpful starting points for thinking about the design and development of mixed reality systems with optimal presence. This paper provides case studies where recent commercial VR applications are analyzed with the proposed principles in mind, in an attempt to illustrate to developers how to think about design of mixed reality games for optimal presence.

POSTER SESSION: Posters and demos

A creative dialog generator for fallout 4 Khalid Alnajjar, Mika Hämäläinen Article No.: 48 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341824

This software demonstration describes a mod for Fallout 4 that will adapt in-game dialog to the context of the current state of the game. The dialog is generated by a computationally creative back-end software during the game play. The mod solves the problem of Fallout 4 not supporting dynamically generated dialog by showing dialog in an overlay application on top of the game window.

A framework for integrating architectural design patterns into PCG Arunpreet Sandhu, Joshua McCoy Article No.: 49 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341839

Asset generation has a huge time cost associated with it in games. In order to reduce this time cost, designers have adopted Procedural Content Generation (PCG) systems into their workflows. However, most PCG techniques may only give a modest workflow speed up. While some PCG techniques can give immense speed ups, they have extra time costs that might not be worth it. These techniques require users to encode their domain knowledge in a way these techniques can understand. This can be a costly process and the technique might not be able to be reused in another project. We propose a framework for encoding domain knowledge in a way to promote reusability. We provide an example that is based in architectural design philosophies.

ANX dread: a virtual reality experience to explore anxiety during task completion Chanelle Mosquera, Bonita Galvan, Ellen Liu, Ross De Vito, Perry Ting, Enrica Lovaglio Costello, Zoë J. Wood Article No.: 50 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341821

The use of virtual reality as an assistance technology is of wide interest [2, 9, 10]. In particular, recent work in the use of virtual reality to help users manage psychological challenges has been fruitful [5, 7, 11]. In this poster, we present a student capstone project, focused on studying users experience focused on anxiety driven by task completion.

This VR experience, named 'ANX Dread', immerses users into a mildly stressful environment of a malfunctioning spaceship with simple puzzle like tasks to complete. The experience, built with Unity, includes an integrated heart-rate monitor. The project was built as a part of the capstone experience for the 'Computing for the Interactive Arts' minor for the 2018-19 academic year by a team of five students from various academic backgrounds. This poster presents the system and a study reflecting the user's sense of anxiety within the experience.

Cologon: a game to foster communication skills in inclusive education Matthias Steinböck, Naemi Luckner, Fares Kayali, Michelle Proyer, Gertraud Kremsner Article No.: 51 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341834

Inclusive education deals with the participation of vulnerable and marginalised - especially disabled - people in learning and with reducing exclusive aspects within and from education. Communication skills under an inclusive perspective are to be understood as more than spoken or written word. Levels of languages used and alternative modes of communication are to be explored and harnessed.

However, game complexity and technical constraints hamper the seamless integration in real world environments, especially when addressing groups aside from the mainstream. Building on four design challenges, we aim to develop an independently usable, user-friendly and user-oriented, technically low-threshold game called Cologon that fosters communication skills and takes into account the players diverse (dis)abilities, needs, and preferences - in simple terms: an inclusive game.

In this paper we present our iterative participatory design process and the conceptual prototype. The results of an evaluation of this prototype in a participatory game design workshop point to unique insights: participants prioritised visual and audible cues above any use of language and one-device-per-player combined with the choice of roles was a challenge for all participants and created a creative communication experience.

Composition of basic heuristics for the game 2048 Iris Kohler, Theresa Migler, Foaad Khosmood Article No.: 52 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341838

2048 is a simple and intriguing sliding block puzzle game that has been studied for several years. Many complex solvers, often developed using neural nets are available and capable of achieving very high scores. We are, however, interested in using only basic heuristics, the kind that could be conceivably employed by human players without the aid of computation. A common way to implement a 2048 solver involves searching the game tree for the best moves, choosing a move and scoring the game board using some evaluation functions. The choice in heuristic evaluation function can dramatically affect the moves chosen by the solver. Furthermore, two or more possible moves can frequently produce the same score as evaluated by the same heuristic function, requiring either a random choice, or the use of a secondary or back up evaluation function which itself in turn may produce a tie. In this paper, we test the effectiveness of several basic heuristics in a simple 2048 solver. In order to test these, we create a system that takes basic predefined heuristic evaluation functions as input parameters, generates compositions from these functions with certain rules, and automatically tests all of them with a specified number of games. We find that compositions of evaluation functions that maximize empty spaces and monotonicity of tiles on the board-especially those that prioritize high numbers of empty spaces above prioritizing higher monotonicity- perform the best out of all compositions that we test.

Developing a virtual reality game for manufacturing education Richard Zhao, Faisal Aqlan, Lisa Jo Elliott, Heather C. Lum Article No.: 53 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341831

This paper describes the development of a virtual reality (VR) simulation game for educating engineering students in manufacturing. Undergraduate engineering students work on solving design and manufacturing problems and utilize professional skills to improve their overall performance and outcome. This research utilizes interactive and immersive VR technologies to develop a new integrated approach to understand problem solving in engineering students and determine if engineering students are attending to the correct elements while they are solving design and manufacturing problems. Furthermore, a player modeling technique is proposed to deliver an experience adapted for each student. The approach will be tested, validated and used to bridge the skills gap that exists for many undergraduate engineering students.

Enhancing social exergames through idle game design Jennifer Villareale, Robert C. Gray, Anushay Furqan, Thomas Fox, Jichen Zhu Article No.: 54 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341827

This paper recognizes idle games as a promising direction for exergames and other games designed for behavioral change. Based on a survey of 11 popular idle games, we extend existing literature by identifying the common core gameplay loop (active participation, inactive progress, and return reward) as well as the design patters used to support the loop. Furthermore, we propose an initial approach to extending idle game patterns to social exergames, focusing on improving player adherence.

Evolving unsupervised neural networks for Slither.io Mitchell Miller, Megan Washburn, Foaad Khosmood Article No.: 55 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341837

Slither.io is a massively multiplayer online game in which up to 500 players control worm-like avatars and consume food to grow with the goal of becoming the largest player while avoiding running into one another. The platform serves as a good testbed for developing AI controlled agents due to its accessibility, mechanical simplicity, and unpredictability. In this paper, we develop a Slither.io bot using neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) and compare its performance to that of the best open source bot available online (a high-performing expert system bot). With a fitness function based on the final size of the agent, our results show steady improvement in average score. We discuss the unique emergent behaviors observed by our top performing agents.

Exploring how preference and perceived performance vary in different game genres across time of day Dominic Kao, J. J. De Simone Article No.: 56 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341830

Time of day effects have been observed for the last five decades in cognitive tasks, athletic performance, and even ethical behavior. However, in the context of games, little is known about how time of day influences preference or performance. We present a first study (N=504) to explore how preference and perceived performance vary over the course of the day, by game genre. We find that the genres First-Person Shooter and Other RPG are more popular at 6 p.m. to midnight. Conversely, the genres Puzzle and Board/Card were less popular at 6 p.m. to midnight. However, 6 a.m. to noon is a more popular time for Puzzle and Board / Card. Performance-wise, players feel they are more successful in First-Person Shooter games from 6 p.m. to midnight, and less successful at all other times. On the other hand, players feel they are more successful in Puzzle games from 6 a.m. to noon, and less successful from 6 p.m. to midnight. These inter-genre differences have a basis in the literature, which has postulated that cognitive function gradually declines throughout the day, but that athletic performance peaks in the evening along with core body temperature.

Intrinsically musical game worlds: abstract music generation as a result of gameplay Neil Koons, Michael Haungs Article No.: 57 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341833

This poster submission explores the concept of nuanced dynamic music generation as a core game mechanic. The world in which this game is set is intrinsically musical. All events and actions in the world add to the music rather than being sound effects that are layered over top of a soundtrack. The music that is generated is often more of a rhythmic soundscape than a song in this game.

The goal of the game is not to play a song correctly. Rather, it is to navigate a world, complete puzzles and kill enemies. Playing the game well will sound more musical than playing it poorly. This concept explores a new realm of creative opportunity for game designers. For example, musically cohesive audio can provide clues to a player for how to progress through a level. This core mechanic has the potential to engage a player in ways that most games do not.

JavaStrike: a Java programming engine embedded in virtual worlds Dominic Kao Article No.: 58 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341828

In this paper, we describe JavaStrike1. JavaStrike is a Java development and execution environment that was developed from scratch inside Unity. The engine currently supports classes, functions, inheritance, polymorphism, interfaces, key-value stores, and much more. JavaStrike allows code to be displayed, executed, and debugged in the virtual world. We then create a third-person shooter game called CodeBreakers, which leverages the JavaStrike engine. CodeBreakers covers basic programming concepts such as variable types, intermediate programming concepts such as stacks, queues, and hashmaps, and advanced programming concepts such as inheritance, interfaces, and method overriding. JavaStrike is a first step towards general purpose programming engines embedded in virtual worlds.

Panoptyk: information driven MMO engine Mitchell Miller, Sean Mendonca, Nathan Philliber, Foaad Khosmood Article No.: 59 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341835

Project Panoptyk is a game engine designed to run Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games with information creation, sharing, and exchange as the central gameplay focus. This engine is a work in progress, intended to serve as a platform for simulating human/robot interaction, as well as automatic generation of game assets, quests, and real-estate. The project also aims to create an open platform allowing indie and research communities to experiment with MMO concepts. In pursuit of these goals, we identify and address a number of challenges that have traditionally made it difficult for independent designers or researchers to be competitive in creation of new MMO games.

Rhythm dungeon: a blockchain-based music roguelike game Tengfei Wang, Shuyi Zhang, Xiao Wu, Wei Cai Article No.: 60 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341836

Rhythm Dungeon is a rhythm game which leverages the blockchain as a shared open database. During the gaming session, the player explores a roguelike dungeon by inputting specific sequences in time to music rhythm. By integrating smart contract to the game program, the enemies through the venture are generated from other games which share the identical blockchain. On the other hand, the player may upload their characters at the end of their journey, so that their own character may appear in other games and make an influence. Rhythm Dungeon is designed and implemented to show the potential of decentralized gaming experience, which utilizes the blockchain to provide asynchronous interactions among massive players.

S4LVE: shareable videogame analysis and visualization Eric Kaltman, Joseph C. Osborn, John Aycock Article No.: 61 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341826

We describe a new browser-based tool for analyzing the behavior of computational systems, with worked examples for the Atari 2600. Our tool, S4LVE (System State Sequence Search Language and Visualization Environment), consists of three main parts. First, we define a domain-specific visualization language tailored for understanding low-level memory operations. Second, we leverage a discrete time-series pattern matching language inspired by regular expressions to capture states and memory locations of interest. Third, we integrate these little languages with an intuitive, spreadsheet-based visual interface juxtaposed with a live emulator. This combined system supports both the incremental exploration of complex emergent systems and rapid iteration on new visualizations.

Teaching gameful design Fares Kayali, Naemi Luckner, Peter Purgathofer Article No.: 62 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341823

This paper discusses the course 'Gameful Design' held as part of the computer science master curriculum at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien). We argue that the challenge of meaningfully teaching serious game design and gamification design is not solved by solely imparting design guidelines. It is a matter of conveying a method of how to engage with a real-world problem, how to ideate and explore, and how to iterate and reflect on gameful design. We describe the three methodological cornerstones the course is built on - research-based teaching, design thinking and explorative design - and outline the format of the course. From a relective practice perspective, we give structured tangible advice how to run such a course in the form of guidelines and we describe the impact it had on our own research.

The adventures of Ms. Meta: chapter one demo Sarah Zaidan Article No.: 63 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341832

Superheroes have crossed over into other media ever since Superman starred in his own radio show and cartoon series in the 1940s; however, the same characters exist simultaneously within a multiplicity of media forms in the 21st century an extent that is greater and more prevalent in mainstream Western culture than ever before. Film adaptations of superheroes occupy the media landscape alongside their counterparts in comic books, live-action and animated television and web series, console and mobile video games, and a staggering amount of merchandise. Frequently, representations of the same character will diverge sharply from or even contradict what has been previously established about them. This phenomenon is not restricted to adaptations across different media forms, and has been occurring in the comics themselves since the Golden Age of the superhero genre in the 1940s. Superheroes are fictional characters, and their only impact on the real world is how successfully they resonate with their audience as aspirational figures. They do not exist in a vacuum, however. New iterations of an existing superhero character are accompanied by the narrative and cultural weight of that character's previous appearances, and the overarching meaning of what this character represents to audiences worldwide.

The Adventures of Ms. Meta is an in-progress video game that grew out of the author's research and creative scholarship, which focuses on the sociohistoric and cultural contexts inherent in video games and superhero comic books, with particular emphasis on the way different identities and systems are represented.

A three-minute gameplay video can be found here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=16bYLrnD\-1B\_aY2IDiLjPKl\_9DNpyR5Ha

The effects of anthropomorphic avatars vs. non-anthropomorphic avatars in a jumping game Dominic Kao Article No.: 64 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341829

Avatar identification is a topic of increasingly intense interest. This is largely because avatar identification can promote a wide variety of outcomes: game enjoyment, intrinsic motivation, quality of made artifacts, and more. Yet we still understand very little about how different avatar types affect users. Here, we contribute one of the few highly controlled studies of this nature (N=1074). Specifically, we compare three avatar types in a jumping game: 1) Human (high anthropomorphism), 2) Block-like (low anthropomorphism), and 3) Robot (high anthropomorphism). We find that players randomly assigned to the Robot condition have significantly higher player experience. We find that both Robot and Human conditions lead to higher avatar identification. Finally, using linear hierarchical regression, we find that avatar identification significantly promotes player experience (29.8% variance) and time played (3.5% variance). Our study demonstrates the importance of considering avatar type in designing virtual systems.

Using game design mechanics as metaphors to enhance learning of introductory programming concepts Chaima Jemmali, Erica Kleinman, Sara Bunian, Mia Victoria Almeda, Elizabeth Rowe, Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 65 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341825

There are several educational games and tools that teach programming. However, very few offer a deep understanding of Computer Science concepts such as Abstraction, Modularity, Semantics, and Debugging. We present May's Journey, an educational game that supports learning of basic programming concepts, where players solve puzzles and interact with the environment by typing in a custom programming language. The game design seamlessly integrates learning goals, core mechanics, and narrative elements. We discuss how we integrate the CS concepts mentioned above using game mechanic metaphors.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on analog origins of digital games

The distributed dungeon master: new media affordances from twitch's choice chamber Colin Stricklin Article No.: 66 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341862

In the Twitch native videogame Choice Chamber, the viewing audience is able to behave as a collective intelligence, making simple majority votes that dynamically change proceeding levels of the game. This "distributed dungeon master" serves to augment the artificial intelligence of the game, taking on a directorial role in addition to its accustomed spectatorship. With roots in traditional tabletop roleplaying games, this digitally-enabled affordance creates new design space within online games and digital performance, as well as new models of convergence culture.

Social features in hybrid board game marketing material Timo Nummenmaa, Ville Kankainen Article No.: 67 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341864

This paper identifies 7 key social features which appear in the marketing and promotional material of hybrid board games. The features are identified by exploring sources such as game websites and game boxes of 13 hybrid board game products. The material is analyzed in order to determine how social features related to hybrid game features are presented. As a result of the analysis, it became apparent that there are certain key social features which are presented as being important to players. The knowledge generated in this work acts as a view to how the industry sees hybridity in games as a tool for supporting social interaction, and how the industry wants to message it to consumers when they explore promotional material. The identified key social features can also be used as design knowledge for developing new games, as they give insight into popular social features in hybrid board games.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Game jam workshop

Motivations of game jam organizers: case of finnish game jam community Ville Kankainen, Annakaisa Kultima, Mikko Meriläinen Article No.: 68 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341840

In this paper, we examine the motivations and experiences of game jam organizers in Finland. For the purpose of the study, 13 game jam organizers were interviewed in 2018 - 2019. We found that motivations for organizing game jams are diverse but interlinked and can be roughly divided into six categories: Community Building, Community Driven, Education, Passion for Organizing, Supporting Creative Culture and Work Driven. Further, we noted that many organizers end up in their position through happenstance rather than actively looking for the role.

Affordances of brainstorming toolkits and their use in game jams Xavier Ho, Martin Tomitsch Article No.: 69 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341841

Brainstorming is an important part of creative design, related to exploring the associativity of different ideas and the combination of their parts. Previous work has investigated social interactions, productivity, techniques, and quality of brainstorming activities. The paper contributes to this body of work by studying the design affordances of brainstorming toolkits, and the relationship between idea associations and brainstorming. We examined 21 brainstorming toolkits designed for creative brainstorming within the context of game design, which led us to four tiers of design affordances that specify the supportive qualities of toolkits for brainstorming. To gain further insights into the use of tools, we surveyed game jams participants about their brainstorming activities and the use of tools at Global Game Jam 2017. We found a large number of participants using traditional stationery to aid brainstorming and a common usage of mind mapping and rearranging post-it notes. These findings inform our discussion of how idea creation is leveraged by a hybrid use of traditional and digital tools.

Jamming with children: an experience report Allan Fowler Article No.: 70 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341842

Although there is an increase in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) career opportunities in most developed economies, the lack of qualified graduates to take these opportunities is a serious concern. Increasing participation in STEM education and experiences has the potential to address this issue. Furthermore, through increasing diversity of STEM qualified graduated not only has the potential to increase participation in STEM careers, but also assist in increasing product and service variety.

In this submission the author presents an experience report of a game development summer camp and game jam for girls aged 9-11 years-old to help them form positive perceptions about computer science (CS) and STEM.

Social interactions in game jams: a jammer recommender tool Johanna Pirker, Andreas Punz, Johannes Kopf Article No.: 71 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341843

In game jams, the jammer constellations and teams are essential elements for successful and engaging game jams and game jam outcomes. In this paper, we discuss and analyze group forming behavior in jam environments but also look at jammers who want to prefer to jam by themselves. In jam environments, especially the group forming task at the beginning of every game jam is essential for the success of the event and the outcomes. However, it is also one of the most challenging tasks. For this paper, we analyzed the data of the Global Game Jams between 2015-2018 with a focus on the formed groups as well as the linked Github profiles. Based on first results, we build an early prototype for recommending groups for the Global Game Jam automatically.

Introducing: the game jam license Gorm Lai, Kai Erenli, Foaad Khosmood, William Latham Article No.: 72 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341844

Since their inception at the Indie Game Jam1 in 2002, a significant part of game jams has been knowledge sharing and showcasing ideas and work to peers. While various licensing mechanisms have been used for game jams throughout the years, there has never been a licence uniquely designed for artifacts created during a game jam. In this paper, we present to the community the Game Jam License (GJL) which is designed to facilitate that sharing and knowledge transfer, while making sure the original creators retain commercial rights. The Global Game Jam2, since 2009, strives to formalise sharing in a similar manner, by having jammers upload and license their creations under Creative Commons3 Non Commercial Share Alike 3.0 free license. However, the CC family of licenses is not well suited for software. CC is not compatible with most other licenses, and introduces a legal grey area with the division between commercial and non-commercial use. Moreover, open source licences like GPL are well suited for source code, but not for art and design content. Instead the GJL presented in this paper, aims to uphold the original ideas of game jams (sharing and knowledge transfer), while still allowing the original team to hold on to all rights to their creation, without any of the deficiencies of the CC family of licenses.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on games and natural language processing

Creative contextual dialog adaptation in an open world RPG Mika Hämäläinen, Khalid Alnajjar Article No.: 73 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341865

Role playing games rely typically on hand-written dialog that has no flexibility in adapting to the game state such as the level of the player. This is an even bigger problem for open world RPGs that make it possible to complete the game quests and objectives virtually in any given order. We present a computationally creative method for adapting Fallout 4 dialog to the changes in the game state using word embeddings for semantics and a BRNN for sequence-to-sequence paraphrasing of syntax.

Retrieving videogame moments with natural language queries Xiaoxuan Zhang, Adam M. Smith Article No.: 74 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341867

Search engines for books can usually tell us which specific pages in a book mention the concepts we seek. A similar ability to search within the contents of games, locating specific moments in their spaces of interactivity, is not yet available. This limits players' ability to find deeply relevant games and game scholars' ability to find moments that advance their arguments. Drawing on computer vision and natural language processing, our work introduces the ability to search within a space of game moments using natural language queries. We describe and evaluate a prototype system which is capable of retrieving moments from two contemporary, narrative-driven games by semantic matching on both the auditory and visual content of scenes.

Wormingo: a 'true gamification' approach to anaphoric annotation Doruk Kicikoglu, Richard Bartle, Jon Chamberlain, Massimo Poesio Article No.: 75 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341868

In this paper we present Wormingo, 1 a new Game-with-a-Purpose for anaphoric annotation. It introduces the motivation-annotation paradigm which uses linguistic puzzles and other widely known gamification techniques and word game mechanics to motivate players to carry out anaphoric annotation tasks. In a preliminary experiment, the game was tested on 270 players recruited through the Reddit platform, achieving promising results.

End-to-end let's play commentary generation using multi-modal video representations Chengxi Li, Sagar Gandhi, Brent Harrison Article No.: 76 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341870

In this paper, we explore how multi-modal video representations can be applied in an end-to-end fashion for automatically generating game commentary based on Let's Play videos using deep learning. We introduce a comprehensive pipeline that involves directly taking videos from YouTube and then using a sequence-to-sequence strategy to learn how to generate appropriate commentary. We evaluate our framework using Let's Play commentaries for the game Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy. To test the quality of the commentary generation, we apply perplexity to evaluate our language models using different input video representations to highlight different aspects of gameplay that might influence commentary.

Making text annotation fun with a clicker game Chris Madge, Richard Bartle, Jon Chamberlain, Udo Kruschwitz, Massimo Poesio Article No.: 77 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341869

In this paper we present WordClicker, a clicker game for text annotation. We believe the mechanics of 'Ville type Free-To-Play (F2P) games in general, and clicker games in particular, is particularly suited for GWAPs (Games-With-A-Purpose). WordClicker was developed as one component of a suite of GWAPs meant to cover all aspects of language interpretation, from tokenization to anaphoric interpretation. As such, WordClicker is intended to have a dual function as part of this suite of GWAPs: both for parts-of-speech annotation and for teaching players about parts of speech so that they can go on and play GWAPs for more complex syntactic annotation. Therefore, game-based language learning platforms also had a strong influence on its design.

Show me how to win: a robot that uses dialog management to learn from demonstrations Maryam Zare, Ali Ayub, Alan R. Wagner, Rebecca J. Passonneau Article No.: 78 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341866

We present an approach for robot learning from demonstration and communication applied to simple board games like Connect Four. In such games, a visual representation of a winning condition on the board can be converted to an extensive form representation that can then support computation of a winning strategy. We present a robot that can learn simple games from responses to visual questions based on synthesized images, or to verbal questions. We illustrate how reliance on both modalities leads to more efficient learning.

Guided open story generation using probabilistic graphical models Sagar Gandhi, Brent Harrison Article No.: 79 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341871

In this work, we present an approach for performing computational storytelling in open domain based on Author Goals. Author Goals are constraints placed on a story event directed by the author of the system. There are two challenges present in this type of story generation: (1) automatically acquiring a model of story progression, and (2) guiding the progress of story progression in light of different goals. We propose a novel approach to story generation based on probabilistic graphical models and Loopy Belief Propagation (LBP) that addresses both of these problems. We show the applicability of our technique through a case study on the Visual Storytelling (VIST) 2017 dataset. We use image descriptions as author goals. This empirical analysis suggests that our approach is able to utilize goals information to better automatically generate stories.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on procedural content generation

Organic building generation in minecraft Michael Cerny Green, Christoph Salge, Julian Togelius Article No.: 80 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341846

This paper presents a method for generating floor plans for structures in Minecraft (Mojang 2009). Given a 3D space, it will auto-generate a building to fill that space using a combination of constrained growth and cellular automata. The result is a series of organic-looking buildings complete with rooms, windows, and doors connecting them. The method is applied to the Generative Design in Minecraft (GDMC) competition [24] to auto-generate buildings in Minecraft, and the results are discussed.

TownSim: agent-based city evolution for naturalistic road network generation Asiiah Song, Jim Whitehead Article No.: 81 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341852

We describe an agent-based city evolution algorithm creating road networks over time, and explore several approaches for analyzing the malleability of the algorithm to exposed parameters. In addition to qualitatively assessing the generated content, we look at the directionality, connectivity, and curvature of the generated road networks.

Stories of the town: balancing character autonomy and coherent narrative in procedurally generated worlds Chris Miller, Mayank Dighe, Chris Martens, Arnav Jhala Article No.: 82 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341850

Procedural narrative generation systems often focus on autonomous agent based simulations to create emergent interactions, plan-based approaches to provide guarantees for coherence, or using elements of simulation to guide plan-based approaches. These different approaches, with some exceptions, tend to trade off character autonomy in service of more designer controlled experiences or content authoring in service of encoding domain knowledge of possible branches of the narrative and participating characters. We have developed a system, called Stories of the Town, that automatically generates narratives by synthesizing three distinct approaches to traditional narrative generation: context-free grammars, planning, and simulation. More specifically, our system generates narratives via probabilistic context-free grammars applied to state-space planning problem solutions from planning problem formulations of simulated character models. Our system uses character simulations to generate variety in narratives and ensures narrative coherence through authoring probabilistic context-free grammars. By doing so, this system takes advantage of the strengths of each individual approach (e.g. controllability, scalability, intentionality, and variety) to generate narratives that are extensible, expressive, consistent with simulated character personalities and histories, and controllable. We show that this system has strong potential in automatically generating varied, complex, consistent, and goal-oriented narratives. Further development of the system will allow for more efficient utilization of the strengths of each narrative generation approach while also using these strengths to supplement their individual shortcomings.

Design-centric maze generation Paul Hyunjin Kim, Jacob Grove, Skylar Wurster, Roger Crawfis Article No.: 83 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341854

A maze is a common structure in a game level. When we design game levels having a different purpose of each level, we may desire mazes with different topological properties, such as lots of branches or long straight-ways. Thus, we need the ability to design mazes based on our game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce our design-centric maze generation in which designers can input their desired properties to create their own mazes. Our method also enables the designers to control the topology of the solution path of a maze. Additionally, this method can provide several mazes which satisfy the given desired properties allowing designers to choose the best maze and use it to build game content for a game level. To demonstrate how useful our design-centric method is, this paper provides several use-cases of building actual game levels and shows that we can design the levels effectively using our method.

Two-step constructive approaches for dungeon generation Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Athoug Alsoughayer, Divyesh Surana, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius Article No.: 84 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341847

This paper presents a two-step generative approach for creating dungeons in the rogue-like puzzle game MiniDungeons 2. Generation is split into two steps, initially producing the architectural layout of the level as its walls and floor tiles, and then furnishing it with game objects representing the player's start and goal position, challenges and rewards. Three layout creators and three furnishers are introduced in this paper, which can be combined in different ways in the two-step generative process for producing diverse dungeons levels. Layout creators generate the floors and walls of a level, while furnishers populate it with monsters, traps, and treasures. We test the generated levels on several expressivity measures, and in simulations with procedural persona agents.

A generalized semantic representation for procedural generation of rooms J. Timothy Balint, Rafael Bidarra Article No.: 85 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341848

Procedural generation of rooms aims to create virtual environments that mimic common patterns found in real-world indoor locations, like offices or bedrooms. Graph-based models (e.g. factor graphs or Bayesian networks) have often been used to represent typical location's objects and their occurrence likelihood (nodes), as well as their inter-relationships (edges). Previous methods have struggled to represent object semantics in their graph nodes; specifically, they fail to fully and effectively support notions as abstractions (e.g. generic seat instead of chair) and replication (e.g. cups instead of cup). We propose a generalized representation and use for object semantics that overcomes the above limitations of graph-based models in the procedural generation of rooms. This node representation handles semantics as attributes, and clearly distinguishes the contribution of the attributes on the node from the potential effects of the node on the whole graph. We illustrate the additional expressive power of the resulting graph-based model for room generation, and show that it subsumes previous models as particular cases.

Cozy mystery construction kit: prototyping toward an AI-assisted collaborative storytelling mystery game Max Kreminski, Devi Acharya, Nick Junius, Elisabeth Oliver, Kate Compton, Melanie Dickinson, Cyril Focht, Stacey Mason, Stella Mazeika, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 86 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341853

This paper presents a case study in the experience-first prototyping of a generative game. Our goal in this process was to create a PCG-based mystery story construction game ncentered on a social simulation of characters and their motivations, and driven by a set of core themes and experiences we wanted players to encounter. In pursuit of this goal, we created a series of prototypes to test how a variety of generative and AI-based techniques---including character generation, character action suggestion based on game state, story sifting, and social simulation---may be used in support of collaborative storytelling. In this paper we catalogue these prototypes and what we have learned by creating them, detailing design elements we found to be successful in supporting player creativity and that may be useful to the developers of similar games and experiences going forward.

Anarchy: a library for incremental chaos Peter Mawhorter Article No.: 87 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341851

Pseudo-random number generators are ubiquitous components of content generation systems, because their outputs are difficult to predict but also repeatable given an initial seed. These properties make them especially useful as the basis for "random" decisions during a generative process, as they allow the process to be chaotic but also repeatable. This paper describes an open-source family of pseudo-random algorithms which allow for shuffling and distributing items in a reversible and incremental manner. To demonstrate the applicability of these algorithms, I show how they have been used in the creation of a word-search game which includes strong guarantees about the distribution of words that can be discovered.

Generators that read Max Kreminski, Isaac Karth, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 88 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341849

Most discussions of procedural content generation have focused primarily on the artifacts that generators produce or the process by which these artifacts are created. Less focus, however, has been placed on the methods by which generators interpret their input. Many generators take complex input, act as part of a generative pipeline, are part of a mixed-initiative communication with the user, or otherwise need to take context into account during generation. In these cases, the process by which the generator reads and makes sense of its input is often just as interesting as the process by which it produces an output artifact. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at how generators read. Via a case study of two erasure poetry generators, we propose the concept of a generativist reading: a process of reading that produces generative models. Many existing generators have dual input/output or reading/writing processes that are presented as a monolithic unit, but our understanding of both processes and results is enriched when we clearly distinguish between how generators write and how they read.

Addressing the fundamental tension of PCGML with discriminative learning Isaac Karth, Adam M. Smith Article No.: 89 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341845

Procedural content generation via machine learning (PCGML) is typically framed as the task of fitting a generative model to full-scale examples of a desired content distribution. This approach presents a fundamental tension: the more design effort expended to produce detailed training examples for shaping a generator, the lower the return on investment from applying PCGML in the first place. In response, we propose the use of discriminative models, which capture the validity of a design rather the distribution of the content, trained on positive and negative example design fragments. Through a modest modification of WaveFunctionCollapse, a commercially-adopted PCG approach that we characterize as using elementary machine learning, we demonstrate a new mode of control for learning-based generators. We demonstrate how an artist might craft a focused set of additional positive and negative design fragments by critique of the generator's previous outputs. This interaction mode bridges PCGML with mixed-initiative design assistance tools by working with a machine to define a space of valid designs rather than just one new design.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on tenure & promotion practices in games & interactive media

Academics without borders Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 90 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341872

Games research is a growing interdisciplinary field. As with many interdisciplinary fields, early career faculty often confront many questions concerning the tenure process and evaluation of their interdisciplinary work. While there have been several publications on guidelines or best practices for evaluating interdisciplinary research, addressing Tenure and Promotion policies and processes for faculty as well as units and chairs, none specifically discusses tenure and promotion practices and guidelines for games research. Wardrip---Fruin and Mateas, in a report dating back to 2014 [17], outlined some challenges and recommendations for supporting work within the area of computational media. This report was the first to unpack some issues faced by computational media researchers with some recommendations to the community, funding agencies and institutions, to support this growing and evolving research area. However, this report did not target the tenure and promotion process, specifically. Now that the community is maturing with many faculty already undergoing or have undergone tenure and promotion, more publications and discussions are needed to support the diverse nature of this research area and its junior faculty. This workshop is then a first step to address this issue within the community. This article contributes to this discussion by outlining previous publications' recommendations and guidelines for inter-disciplinary research that are also applicable to the games research area. Additionally, the article also outlines specific unique aspects for games research with some take-aways of challenges and action items that we can take as a community to address these challenges.

Publication and evaluation challenges in games & interactive media Elizabeth Lane Lawley Article No.: 91 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341873

Faculty in the fields of games and interactive media face significant challenges in publishing and documenting their scholarly work for evaluation in the tenure and promotion process. These challenges include selecting appropriate publication venues and assigning authorship for works spanning multiple disciplines; archiving and accurately citing collaborative digital projects; and redefining "peer review," impact, and dissemination in the context of creative digital works. In this paper I describe many of these challenges, and suggest several potential solutions.

Tenure and promotion in the next era of game design and development programs: some thoughts and observations Christopher A. Egert, Andrew Phelps Article No.: 92 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341874

Over the last two decades, programs in the field of game design and development have emerged and begun to flourish in the collegiate landscape. As academics look toward the next two decades, there is still much to be done in defining what game design and development programs represent and what those in the field respect and value in the process of tenure and promotion. Despite trends that indicate the field is beginning to stabilize, it seems there are more questions than answers as to what academics should be doing in these programs to achieve tenure and to have a career such in which they can achieve the awards and accolades of the academic system. In this paper, the authors examine some of the perceptions and challenges that await faculty in these programs and pose questions as to what barriers are still prevalent for careers in the academic field.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on tabletop games

Towards a game-independent model and data-structures in digital board games: an overview of the state-of-the-art Luiz Jonata Pires de Araujo, Mariia Charikova, Juliano Efson Sales, Vladislav Smirnov, Ananga Thapaliya Article No.: 93 doi>10.1145/3337722.3342238

The increasing number of options of digital board games is exciting not only from an entertainment perspective but also from an academic prospect. It enables, for example, the application of modern computational techniques and algorithms for extracting and analyzing data from a variety of games - which range from classics like Chess and Go to modern board games with complex rules like Settlers of Catan and Terra Mystica. It is intuitive that different digital board games require distinct representation schemes and data structures to save, for example, the status or snapshot of a particular game at a specific moment. The choice for a representation model and data-structures is a crucial design decision that affects the selection of an algorithmic solution as well as the suitableness for artificial intelligence agents. This survey focuses on the different schemes and data structures used to represent game states, physical components, players, actions and rules for digital board games that have been reported in the academic literature. This study aims to lay the groundwork for the development of a game-independent computational framework which includes a generic game representation to facilitate and promote the application of computational techniques such as, for example, artificial intelligence and machine learning to this domain.

Dice design respecting player preference for colours and contrast Hamna Aslam, Joseph Alexander Brown, Ecaterina Baba Article No.: 94 doi>10.1145/3337722.3342237

Colours and contrast are significant for aesthetics and for readability reference leading to a need to identify the correlation between the player preference of colours in general and to game objects. The object chosen for the experiment is dice. Dice come in a variety of colours and designs and with its simple usability mechanics, is a compelling object for investigation. These dice are examined for the correlation to players colour preferences and a set of contrasting dice are examined for their readability errors. It was found that the die with minimal contrast provides for more readability errors and greater time required to understand the roll. Furthermore, it has been identified that dice colour preference does not correlate with colour preference.

You have my sword; and my bow; and my axe: player perceptions of odd shaped dice for dungeons & dragons Kamilla Borodina, Hamna Aslam, Joseph Alexander Brown Article No.: 95 doi>10.1145/3337722.3342236

Tabletop role-playing Games (RPG), such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) use dice in order to control the outcome actions by characters when the Game Master needs to introduce randomness. While dice are fundamental to such games, the examination of dice as objects of design has not been explored. This study examines fifty-nine participants (thirty familiar with the D20 set system) and asks them to examine two 7-die sets commonly used in D&D, the first set being a common set of polyhedrons, and the other set designed to replicate the objects used by a Wizard. It examines the fairness perceptions of the participants and finds that players who have experience with the polyhedral set in the past are more likely to accept the fairness of Wizard dice, and that all players are more likely to accept the fairness of the Wizard set after a play session.

Operationalizing conflict strategies in a board game Sarah Harmon, Remington Maxwell, Arnav Jhala Article No.: 96 doi>10.1145/3337722.3342235

The aim of conflict resolution education is to impart essential strategies and skills for resolving conflicts effectively. While these are important life skills, conflict resolution can be difficult to teach because it requires individuals to interact with others, explore new strategies, and receive feedback within a natural social context in order for strong connections to be made. As board games often involve co-located multiplayer interaction and can be effective tools for young learners, we explore the possibility of incorporating learning about conflict resolution into a tabletop game. We describe the process of designing an educational board game - StarStruck - that fosters discussions about conflict management via operationalization of conflict strategies drawn from an instrument founded in social psychology theory. Through in- and out-of-board interactions, StarStruck is designed to provide players with affordances to explore different resolution strategies within their natural social environment. We present examples from initial playtesting sessions to consider the expressive range of conflict scenarios generated by playing the game. This work serves as a preliminary illustration of how to map the vocabulary of conflict resolution to game mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics so that players can naturally engage with and discuss conflict interactions.

WORKSHOP SESSION: Workshop papers and presentations: Workshop on user experience of AI in games

From non-paying to premium: predicting user conversion in video games with ensemble learning Anna Guitart, Shi Hui Tan, Ana Fernández del Río, Pei Pei Chen, África Periáñez Article No.: 97 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341855

Retaining premium players is key to the success of free-to-play games, but most of them do not start purchasing right after joining the game. By exploiting the exceptionally rich datasets recorded by modern video games---which provide information on the individual behavior of each and every player---survival analysis techniques can be used to predict what players are more likely to become paying (or even premium) users and when, both in terms of time and game level, the conversion will take place.

Here we show that a traditional semi-parametric model (Cox regression), a random survival forest (RSF) technique and a method based on conditional inference survival ensembles all yield very promising results. However, the last approach has the advantage of being able to correct the inherent bias in RSF models by dividing the procedure into two steps: first selecting the best predictor to perform the splitting and then the best split point for that covariate.

The proposed conditional inference survival ensembles method could be readily used in operational environments for early identification of premium players and the parts of the game that may prompt them to become paying users. Such knowledge would allow developers to induce their conversion and, more generally, to better understand the needs of their players and provide them with a personalized experience, thereby increasing their engagement and paving the way to higher monetization.

Towards a generalized player model through the PEAS framework Sam Snodgrass, Omid Mohaddesi, Casper Harteveld Article No.: 98 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341856

This paper presents steps towards a generalized player model built around an external personalization and design framework. The external framework, the Player, Environment, Agents, System (PEAS) framework, resulted from a broad scope review of the personalization, player modeling, and game design literature. Leveraging this framework allows us to define a mapping from existing player and personality models to a uniform representation of player preferences over game components. We present our pipeline for developing a generalized player model from these existing models, how to translate and blend them, and finally how to use the blended model for recommending and personalizing games. We follow up the presentation of our pipeline with an extended example to highlight how two existing player modeling approaches can be combined into a singular model, and how that blended model can be used.

Changes of user experience in an adaptive game: a study of an AI manager Francesca Foffano, David Thue Article No.: 99 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341857

Many questions remain unanswered in relation to player experience, particularly with respect to adaptive video games. To explore this topic, our research seeks to investigate how a player's awareness of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience manager affects their perceptions while they play a game. In this paper, we describe a first investigation of this topic, toward identifying areas that could be interesting for further study. The results of our study hint that the awareness of an AI manager might change a player's perceived self-efficacy, depending on the player's gender.

Evaluation of an automatically-constructed graph-based representation for interactive narrative Nathan Partlan, Elin Carstensdottir, Erica Kleinman, Sam Snodgrass, Casper Harteveld, Gillian Smith, Camillia Matuk, Steven C. Sutherland, Magy Seif El-Nasr Article No.: 100 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341858

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As the narrative becomes more structurally complex, due to choice-based branching and other player actions, designers need to employ commensurately capable models and visualizations to keep track of that growing complexity. However, previous models of interactive narrative have failed to fully capture interactive elements with automated, operationalized visualizations. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for automated construction of a framework-driven, graph-based representation of interactive narrative. This representation more fully and transparently models structural and interactive features of the narrative than did prior approaches. We present an initial evaluation of this representation, based on modified cognitive walkthroughs performed by interactive narrative design and research experts from our research team, and we describe the takeaways for future improvement on interactive narrative modeling and analysis.

Non-player character personality and social connection generation Erica Jurado, Kirsten Emma Gillam, Joshua McCoy Article No.: 101 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341859

Increasing the behavioral nuance and interactivity of non-player characters in story worlds comes with a growing cost in the time and effort expended by authors. This paper proposes a system, Cast Affinity Satisfiability Toolkit (CAST), which uses answer set programming to lessen this burden while supporting author autonomy. CAST uses user-defined constraints about personality facets and interests to generate a cast of characters and their relationships. Once salient personality facets and character interests are defined, additional constraints may be supplied about character similarity and affinity. This refines not only character personality but the social connections between characters. Rules about affinity, or the attraction characters feel towards each other, may be used to weight personality facets and interests to generate consistent characters and their relationships that consider the significance of these traits. Although the quality of output is contingent upon the quality of constraints, CAST respects all author supplied constraints and provides the framework to generate NPCs that are consistent and whose relationships are tailored to reflect what is significant in the story world.

A methodology for designing natural language interfaces for procedural content generation Afshin Mobramaein, Jim Whitehead Article No.: 102 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341860

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) uses algorithmic techniques to create a wide variety of content for games. These generators often have a large number of parameters, making it difficult for non-technical designers to explore the design space of generated artifacts. Natural language interfaces for generators can map natural language keywords to parameter space changes spanning multiple simultaneous parameters and afford use of expressive language. This way, designers can navigate to interesting points in the design space of a generator by describing desired properties of the artifact using a series of natural language descriptors. We present a design methodology that designers can use to develop natural language interfaces for procedural content generation systems. This design methodology begins by defining a design vocabulary that can describe the output of a generator, mapping the vocabulary to a series of parameters, and translating natural language queries to movements in the generator's design space. We further address issues around designer intent understanding, design space exploration and workflows using natural language interfaces in PCG. An example and implementation of our methodology is provided demonstrating its application to existing plug-ins for content creation in the Unity3D engine

Generative games as storytelling partners Max Kreminski, Noah Wardrip-Fruin Article No.: 103 doi>10.1145/3337722.3341861

Gameplay involving player creativity can be both satisfying for players and enticing for designers to pursue, but understanding of how to design deliberately for player creativity remains limited. In this paper, we propose that a class of features previously identified as common elements of "gardening games"---including generativity, limited player control, and "incrementality" or "idleness"---are also particularly conducive to player creativity. By analyzing narrative artifacts created by players as retellings of their play experiences in games that implement these features, we highlight how these features enable players to overcome specific barriers to creativity. Based on this analysis, we then offer concrete suggestions to game designers who want to facilitate player creativity and propose ways that the design patterns discussed here might be extended to further support creative activity by players.