Related papers: Gaming the System: Video Games as a Theoretical Fr…
Video game music (VGM) is often studied under the same lens as film music, which largely focuses on its theoretical functionality with relation to the identified genres of the media. However, till date, we are unaware of any systematic…
In recent years, trends towards studying simulated games have gained momentum in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience. The intersections of these fields have also grown recently, as…
Deep learning has revolutionized many areas of machine learning, from computer vision to natural language processing, but these high-performance models are generally "black box." Explaining such models would improve transparency and trust…
Games offer a compelling paradigm for developing general reasoning capabilities in language models, as they naturally demand strategic planning, probabilistic inference, and adaptive decision-making. However, existing self-play approaches…
Game feel design is the intentional design of the affective impact of moment-to-moment interaction with games. In this paper we survey academic research and publications by practitioners to give a complete overview of the state of research…
Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) show great potential for increasing engagement, creativity and authentic learning. Yet, despite their great potential for education, the use of MLGs by teachers, remains limited. This is partly due to the fact…
Automated game design is the problem of automatically producing games through computational processes. Traditionally, these methods have relied on the authoring of search spaces by a designer, defining the space of all possible games for…
Multiplayer games have long been used as testbeds in artificial intelligence research, aptly referred to as the Drosophila of artificial intelligence. Traditionally, researchers have focused on using well-known games to build strong agents.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse contexts to support decision-making. While existing evaluations effectively probe latent model capabilities, they often overlook the impact of context framing on…
In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…
System dynamics is a methodology that is widely used in many academic fields. It explains the behavior of social and economic systems with models that capture complex causality and feedback effects. This 'practice paper' discusses the…
Self-adaptive systems (SAS) can reconfigure at run time in response to changing situations to express acceptable behaviors in the face of uncertainty. With respect to game design, such situations may include user input, emergent behaviors,…
OpenSpiel is a collection of environments and algorithms for research in general reinforcement learning and search/planning in games. OpenSpiel supports n-player (single- and multi- agent) zero-sum, cooperative and general-sum, one-shot and…
Recent successes of game-theoretic formulations in ML have caused a resurgence of research interest in differentiable games. Overwhelmingly, that research focuses on methods and upper bounds on their speed of convergence. In this work, we…
The games research community has developed substantial knowledge on designing engaging experiences that draw players in. Surprisingly, less is known about player \textit{dis}engagement, with existing work predominantly addressing…
As the landscape of software engineering evolves, introductory programming courses must go beyond teaching syntax to foster comprehensive technical competencies and professional soft skills. This paper reports on a pedagogical experience in…
Context: The video game industry is a billion dollar industry that faces problems in the way games are developed. One method to address these problems is using developer aid tools, such as Recommendation Systems. These tools assist…
This paper focuses on "tracing player knowledge" in educational games. Specifically, given a set of concepts or skills required to master a game, the goal is to estimate the likelihood with which the current player has mastery of each of…
Game engines help developers create video games and avoid duplication of code and effort, like frameworks for traditional software systems. In this paper, we explore open-source game engines along three perspectives: literature, code, and…
This paper introduces a geometric framework for analyzing power relations in games, independent of their strategic form. We define a canonical preference space where each player's relational stance is a normalized vector. This model…