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Enhancing Gameplay: Challenges for Artificial Intelligence in Digital Games
Darryl Charles's paper argues that rapid growth in computing power gives game designers a timely opportunity to pursue radical advances in artificial intelligence rather than incremental refinements.
- The paper argues that rapid growth in computing power gives game designers a timely opportunity to pursue radical AI advances rather than incremental refinements, and that AI innovation is essential to avoid industry stagnation and establish games as a serious artistic medium.
- Current titles still rely largely on established techniques such as finite-state machines, A pathfinding, and scripting, with designers prioritizing the appearance of intelligence over realistic behavioral models.
- The paper identifies three priority areas for innovation: storytelling (especially player-driven narratives in MMORPGs), dynamic online learning (illustrated by the rare example of Black & White), and emotional expression, where real-time character animation lags well behind pre-rendered film.
A Joint Study of Super Monkey Ball: Keep the Monkey Rolling: Eye-Hand Coordination in Super Monkey Ball
This pilot study, part of a larger joint examination of Super Monkey Ball conducted by researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, investigates whether eye-hand coordination is linked to computer game skill and whether avid gamers possess superior eye-hand coordination.
- The study is an exploratory pilot from the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, examining whether eye-hand coordination relates to computer game skill and whether avid gamers have superior coordination.
- The research found no reliable link: the data did not substantiate a connection between computer game skill and eye-hand coordination, though the author noted the claim cannot be dismissed outright.
- The empirical component was very small, involving seven boys aged 10 to 13 from an urban after-school centre in Copenhagen, tested with the Test of Visual-Motor Skills before or after a Super Monkey Ball play session.
Wargaming and Computer Games: Fun with the Future
Patrick Crogan's essay traces the history of wargaming to argue that modern computer games carry forward a distinctive relationship to the future, one rooted in the Enlightenment project of rational prediction and control.
- Patrick Crogan argues that modern computer games extend a relationship to the future rooted in the Enlightenment project of rational prediction and control, with the core activity being modelling and simulation.
- Narrative and cultural 'texture' are treated as marginal in games because the central pleasure lies in modelling complex systems, a claim that positions the essay within the ludological tradition while challenging its positivist tendencies.
- Wargaming is traced from Helwig's 1780 squared-board game through Reisswitz's 1824 Kriegsspiel, which impressed the Prussian military and was adopted into officer training, and on through postwar American military and research simulation.
Player Character Design Facilitating Emotional Depth in MMORPGs
This work proposes that massively multiplayer online role-playing games can achieve deeper emotional immersion by giving player characters a "virtual mind," a prosthetic consciousness that moves beyond the combat statistics and generic classes that dominate the genre.
- The report argues that individually authored MMORPG characters cannot scale to thousands of players, so emotional depth must come from a generative system rather than hand-crafted content.
- It proposes a "virtual mind" for player characters, replacing conventional numerical levelling with "being-values" organized around a Mind System, Story Daemons, and a Metaphysics System, developed within the Purgatory Engine and Ouroboros project at the Interactive Institute's Zero Game Studio.
- The mind model layers a two-dimensional affect framework (emotion, mood, sentiment, personality) over a Five Factor trait structure and Maslow's being-values, modeling Ekman's eleven emotions plus "pain".
Computer Games and the Complexity of Experience
This paper by Chiel Kattenbelt and Joost Raessens argues that computer games are typically analyzed through a sensory-motor model borrowed from classical cinema, one that privileges the actuality and causality of action and an Aristotelian, action-driven dramaturgy.
- The paper argues that computer games are typically analyzed through a sensory-motor model borrowed from classical cinema, which privileges action, causality, and an Aristotelian action-driven dramaturgy, and that this framing fails to capture the full complexity of experience both represented in games and lived by players.
- Kattenbelt and Raessens draw on Peirce's categories of firstness (feeling), secondness (action and resistance), and thirdness (reflection), and on Deleuze's movement-image, time-image, and thought-image, to build a framework for analyzing the emotional, volitional, and cognitive dimensions of play.
- The authors propose three player subject positions relative to a game's represented world: the lyric (emotional and affective), the dramatic (action-oriented and sensory-motor), and the epic (reflective and contemplative).
"You Can't Help Shouting and Yelling": Fun and Social Interaction in Super Monkey Ball
This paper by Lisbeth Klastrup examines how social interaction contributes to the experience of fun in multiplayer console gaming, using Super Monkey Ball as its case study.
- Console multiplayer play happens in shared living-room settings close to other players, resembling television viewing as a domestic social activity, which encourages sociability distinct from isolated PC gaming.
- Fun in the study emerges from oscillating between mastering a game's rules and staying absorbed in its world, with games acting as "affective alliances" around shared, time-limited experiences.
- A pilot study of nine participants (aged 20 to 30) in groups of experienced players, inexperienced players, and a contrasting male group found all experienced players wanted to play again and most inexperienced players did too.
Approaches to Computer Game Design: Characters and Conflict
This paper examines how computer games generate action, arguing that action is the defining feature of games from the player's perspective and that it can be created and directed through well-defined characters with conflicting needs and motivations.
- Action is presented as the defining feature of games from the player's perspective, and it can be created and directed through well-defined characters with conflicting needs and motivations.
- Players perceive a game as logically coherent only when character motivations are consistent with the game's structure; the design of characters, expectations, and space must work together to guide meaningful engagement.
- Player expectations shape interpretation and behavior, including an assumed 'expectation of gaming' that a game should be interesting, challenging, and actionable, plus expectations driven by genre and intermediality.
iDTV Gamers: The Emergence of a New Community?
Interactive digital television (iDTV) gaming in the United Kingdom is examined as the emergence of a distinct and growing viewer community, one that departs from the traditional image of the PC or console gamer.
- Roughly 40% of UK homes now have interactive digital television (iDTV), and 44% of digital consumers play games on it, with NTL's games channel drawing older, family-oriented, and lower socio-economic audiences.
- iDTV gaming is characterised by short "dipping" sessions alongside television viewing and a preference for simple, family-friendly titles, making it an extension of household TV habits rather than a dedicated pastime.
- A Netpoll study of 50 homes identified three iDTV player types: Generation I teens, Early Clickers, and Daytime Dabblers.
Console Games in the Age of Convergence
Console gaming's history since the 1980s, as this analysis traces it, has moved through a repeating cycle of convergence, divergence, and convergence again, with each phase shaped as much by institutional strategy as by raw technical capability.
- Console gaming has cycled through repeated phases of convergence and divergence since the 1980s, with each phase shaped by institutional strategy as much as by technical capability.
- Nintendo held over 80 percent of the US console market and about 90 percent of Japan's in 1989, before Sony's CD-ROM-based PlayStation entered in 1995 and captured over 20 percent of the games market by 1996 through aggressive pricing and a larger software library.
- Sega withdrew from hardware after the Dreamcast's online strategy failed amid slow modem speeds and weak uptake of its service, while Sony's PlayStation came to dominate the late-1990s and early-2000s market.
Augmented Reality for a Casual User: Designing Tools for Interaction with the Virtual World
This paper, authored by researchers at Nokia Research Center, argues that augmented reality should be accessible to casual users rather than dependent on expensive head-mounted displays and wearable computers.
- The paper argues AR should be accessible to casual users rather than dependent on expensive head-mounted displays and wearable computers, with users actively creating content in a shared, collaborative AR layer instead of only viewing a static world.
- The central thesis is that letting everyone contribute digital objects, stories, and games to shared AR spaces can enhance social interaction between people.
- The proposed system pairs an AR world server, which stores data objects with triggers tied to location, temperature, or other available information, with client devices through which users see and interact with that content.
The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG
Across its argument, this work contends that massively multiplayer online role-playing games, despite their rhetoric of alternative universes, function as genuine public spaces.
- The report argues that MMORPGs such as EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, and Star Wars Galaxies function as genuine public spaces, countering theorists like Richmond, Davidson, and Gibson who deny that virtual environments can support authentic public interaction.
- Its central mechanism is oppositional game design: dividing the world into safe cities, dangerous wilderness, and quest zones, with the environment acting as antagonist, creates functional dependence on other players, which the author identifies as the foundation of community.
- Drawing on de Certeau's strategies and tactics, along with the figures of the crowd and the flâneur, the analysis holds that public space emerges through player improvisation within designed frameworks rather than from the designed structure alone.
In Defense of Cutscenes
Rune Klevjer's essay "In Defense of Cutscenes" mounts a theoretical argument against radical ludology, the position that narrative elements in games are irrelevant ornaments layered over play.
- Klevjer's essay argues against radical ludology, the view that narrative in games is an irrelevant ornament, and instead holds that cutscenes are an integral part of the gaming experience where narration and play can coexist.
- Klevjer contends that game events are inherently representational and rhetorical 'symbolic actions,' which gives narrative framing a legitimate role in shaping how players understand their activity.
- The essay addresses the 'paradox of make-believe' in story-based games such as Grand Theft Auto III, where players want both open-ended agency and a pre-written narrative, and argues cutscenes resolve this tension through genre-based framing.