Related papers: Link, user-centred designer: Game characters as tr…

Mainstream games are typically designed around the visual experience, with behaviors and interactions highly dependent on vision. Despite this, blind people are playing mainstream games while dealing with and overcoming inaccessible…

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…

Data is becoming an important central point for making design decisions for most software. Game development is not an exception. As data-driven methods and systems start to populate these environments, a good question is: can we make models…

Deceptive game designs that manipulate players are increasingly common in the gaming industry, but the impact on players is not well studied. While studies have revealed player frustration, there is a gap in understanding how cultural…

In video games, non-player characters (NPCs) play a pivotal role in shaping players' experiences. The design of these characters, encompassing their appearance and behaviors, can be manipulated in terms of coherence and consistency to…

We explore how interaction with large language models (LLMs) can give rise to emergent behaviors, empowering players to participate in the evolution of game narratives. Our testbed is a text-adventure game in which players attempt to solve…

We propose modeling designer style in mixed-initiative game content creation tools as archetypical design traces. These design traces are formulated as transitions between design styles; these design styles are in turn found through…

An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the…

In this paper, we address the problem of creating believable agents (virtual characters) in video games. We consider only one meaning of believability, ``giving the feeling of being controlled by a player'', and outline the problem of its…

The swift evolution of Large-scale Models (LMs), either language-focused or multi-modal, has garnered extensive attention in both academy and industry. But despite the surge in interest in this rapidly evolving area, there are scarce…

Methods for learning latent user representations from historical behavior logs have gained traction for recommendation tasks in e-commerce, content streaming, and other settings. However, this area still remains relatively underexplored in…

Generative models are trained with the simple objective of imitating the conditional probability distribution induced by the data they are trained on. Therefore, when trained on data generated by humans, we may not expect the artificial…

This study explores the prevalence of dark patterns in mobile games that exploit players through temporal, monetary, social, and psychological means. Recognizing the ethical concerns and potential harm surrounding these manipulative…

We designed and built a game called \textit{Immersive Text Game}, which allows the player to choose a story and a character, and interact with other characters in the story in an immersive manner of dialogues. The game is based on several…

Human-like agents are an increasingly important topic in games and beyond. Believable non-player characters enhance the gaming experience by improving immersion and providing entertainment. They also offer players the opportunity to engage…

Game designs often center on the game mechanics---rules governing the logical evolution of the game. We seek to develop an intelligent system that generates computer games. As first steps towards this goal we present a composable and…

We introduce the concept of a generative infinite game, a video game that transcends the traditional boundaries of finite, hard-coded systems by using generative models. Inspired by James P. Carse's distinction between finite and infinite…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous decision-makers in strategic settings, yet we have limited tools for understanding their high-level behavioral traits. We use activation steering methods in game-theoretic…

Games research and industry have developed a solid understanding of how to design engaging, playful experiences that draws players in for hours and causes them to lose their sense of time. While these designs can provide enjoyable…

We present an approach to generate novel computer game levels that blend different game concepts in an unsupervised fashion. Our primary contribution is an analogical reasoning process to construct blends between level design models learned…