Artists play games

Andrzej Pitrus discusses complex relationships between the two worlds – art and computer/ games. Numerous artists are looking for inspirations in the world of an interactive entertainment, yet some of them are creating new paths of its development. Some of the artists focus on new and unique interfaces. Others refer to the mechanics of games to create their own interactive works. Bill Viola’s The Night Journey is an excellent example of such project. The author also reviews critical games, which are based on the mechanisms easily found in commercial games. Yet, their goal is to deconstruct them, rather than followig well known tracks. Pitrus examines this strategy in the works of a famous studio “Tale of Tales”.

Narrative Planning Model Acquisition from Text Summaries and Descriptions

AI Planning has been shown to be a useful approach for the generation of narrative in interactive entertainment systems and games. However, the creation of the underlying narrative domain models is challenging: the well documented AI planning modelling bottleneck is further compounded by the need for authors, who tend to be non-technical, to create content. We seek to support authors in this task by allowing natural language (NL) plot synopses to be used as a starting point from which planning domain models can be automatically acquired. We present a solution which analyses input NL text summaries, and builds structured representations from which a pddl model is output (fully automated or author in-the-loop). We introduce a novel sieve-based approach to pronoun resolution that demonstrates consistently high performance across domains. In the paper we focus on authoring of narrative planning models for use in interactive entertainment systems and games. We show that our approach exhibits comprehensive detection of both actions and objects in the system-extracted domain models, in combination with significant improvement in the accuracy of pronoun resolution due to the use of contextual object information. Our results and an expert user assessment show that our approach enables a reduction in authoring effort required to generate baseline narrative domain models from which variants can be built.

Game localization pitfalls: Translating variables and gender

Variables and gender constitute game localization pitfalls due to the fact that games are interactive entertainment software and contain dynamically generated content. Variables pose a problem in languages (such as Polish) which use inflection (conjugation and declination). Gender is an issue as the player, the characters the player creates, and the characters the player encounters in the game world can be male or female. Gender neutrality is a requirement not only in all messages directed to the player but also in plot related texts such as dialogs and journals. The present article seeks to investigate the subject of variables and gender in order to determine some strategies for dealing with these pitfalls.