Playtesting is the primary process that allows a game designer to access game quality. Current playtesting methods are often intrusive to play, involves much manual labor, and might not even portray the player's true feedback. This paper aims to alleviate these shortcomings by presenting the position that state of the art artificial intelligence techniques can construct automated playtesting systems that supplement or even substitute this process to a certain extent. Several potential research directions are proposed in this theme. A work-in-progress report is also included to demonstrate the conceptual feasibility of the potentials of this research area.

We propose the creation of computational caricatures as a design research practice that aims to advance understanding of the game design process and to develop the reusable technology for design automation. Computational caricatures capture and exaggerate statements about the game design process in the form of computational systems (i.e. software and hardware). In comparison with empirical interviews of game designers, arguments from established design theory, and the creation of neutral simulations of the design process, computational caricatures provide more direct access to inquiry and insight about design. Further, they tangibly demonstrate architectures and subsystems for a new generation of human-assisting design support systems and adaptive games that embed aspects of automated design in their runtime processes. In this paper, we frame the idea of computational caricature, review several existing design automation prototypes through the lens of caricature, and call for more design research to be done following this practice.

Game metrics are an approach to understanding games and gameplay by analyzing and visualizing information collected from players in playtests. This paper proposes that another source of metrics is the game itself, and that not all information needs to (or ought to) come from empirical playtests. I discuss seven strategies for extracting information from games, and discuss how the information retrieved in this manner relates to empirical playtest metrics---which it differs from but can often complement.

Due to the changing nature of videogames, the component-based architecture is the design of choice for managing game entities instead of the traditional static class hierarchies. A component-based architecture lets programmers edit entities as collections of components, which provide the entity with new functionalities. Such architecture promotes flexibility but makes the code more difficult to understand because entities are built at runtime by linking components. In this paper we present a semi-automatic process for moving from a class hierarchy to a component-based architecture. Through the application of Formal Concept Analysis we propose a novel technique for automatically identifying candidate distributions of responsibilities among components.

This paper presents the latest version of the Machinations framework. This framework uses diagrams to represent the flow of tangible and abstract resources through a game. This flow represents the mechanics that make up a game’s interbal economy and has a large impact on the emergent gameplay of most simulation games, strategy games and board games. This paper shows how Machinations diagrams can be used simulate and balance games before they are built.

A growing body of work in games research, both generative and analytic, seeks to characterize the relationship between a player’s understanding of an interactive narrative and her options for action within it. This paper provides several definitions that collectively serve as a basis for a model of the user’s comprehension of an unfolding story in a game. Central to this approach, we define the notion of narrative affordance. In essence, a game provides a narrative affordance for some course of action when a player can imagine that course of action as part of a story that completes their current story experience. To define narrative affordance, we draw links from cognitive models of narrative comprehension and a range of research on affordance, which we couple with planning approaches to story and discourse generation. In our approach, we view the creation of an interactive narrative that provides a high degree of agency as a discourse generation problem. We posit that an interactive narrative system must reason about the content and organization of its communication with a player in order to prompt a player’s understanding about the game’s story and her role in it. This paper ends by pointing toward a research direction intended to provide insight into a range of aspects of interactive narrative, including role, genre, choice and agency.

Interactive Narrative often involves dialogue with virtual dramatic characters. In this paper we compare two kinds of models of character style: one based on models derived from the Big Five theory personality, and the other derived from a corpus-based method applied to characters and films from the IMSDb archive. We apply these models to character utterances for a pilot narrative-based outdoor augmented reality game called Murder in the Arboretum . We use an objective quantitative metric to estimate the quality of a character model, with the aim of predicting model quality without perceptual experiments. We show that corpus-based character models derived from individual characters are often more detailed and specific than personality based models, but that there is a strong correlation between personality judgments of original character dialogue and personality judgments of utterances generated for Murder in the Arboretum that use the derived character models.

This paper presents a framework that facilitates communication between a planning system (“planner”) and a plan execution system (“executor”) to enable them to run concurrently, with the main emphasis on meeting the real-time requirements of the application domain. While the framework is applicable to general-purpose planning, its features are optimized for the requirements of automated story planning for games—with emphasis on monitoring player-triggered events and handling on-time (re-)generation of story assets such as characters, maps and scenarios. This framework subsumes the traditional interleaved planning-and-execution paradigm used in embedded continual planning systems and generalizes it to a non-embedded context, making the framework ideal for use with contemporary game architectures (e.g., multithreaded game engines, or games with subsystems communicating over a network).

In this paper we focus on proactive behavior for non-player characters (NPCs) in the first-person shooter (FPS) genre of video games based on goal-oriented planning. Some recent approaches for applying real-time planning in commercial video games show that the existing hardware is starting to follow up on the computing resources needed for such techniques to work well. Nonetheless, it is not clear under which conditions real-time efficiency can be guaranteed. In this paper we give a precise specification of SimpleFPS, a STRIPS planning domain expressed in PDDL that captures some basic planning tasks that may be useful in a first person shooter video game. This is intended to work as a first step towards quantifying the performance of different planning techniques that may be used in real-time to guide the behavior of NPCs. We present a simple tool we developed for generating random planning problem instances in PDDL with user defined properties, and show some preliminary results based on SimpleFPS instances that vary in the size of the domain and two well-known planners from the planning community.

In this paper, we discuss approaches to dialogue in interactive video games and interactive narrative research. We propose that situating interactive dialogue in the simplified expectations of video games is a profitable way to investigate computational dialogue simulation. Taking cues from existing physical simulations such as combat, we propose a hypothetical game environment and design goals for an embedded interactive dialogue system. We present a modular framework targeted at that environment, which is designed to enable incremental development and exploration of dialogue concepts. We describe this framework together with a work-in-progress system for simulating simple in-game negotiation dialogues.