Meeting Game Researchers

The Center for Advanced Gaming and Simulation (AGS) and the Dutch chapter of DIGRA organize meetings for game researchers four times a year. We meet at the Faculty Club Helios, address: Achter de Dom 7a, Utrecht. The meetings normally consist of two lectures, followed by some drinks for further discussions. The meetings will be held in English.

The next meeting is scheduled in september. Location: Kanunnikenzaal, Faculty Club Helios. Participation in this meeting is free. It is necessary though to register. Please register below. Please note: the meeting on June 18 has been cancelled.

Program

• 15.00 Welcome with coffee and tea
  
  
• 15.15 Presentation by Ivo Swartjes (Researcher at the Human Media Interaction group of the University of Twente, and has a background in Computer Science. Recently he received his PhD degree on the topic of interactive storytelling and dramatic improvisation. His research interests include computational creativity, interactive media, serious games and intelligent virtual agents.)
  Whose story is it anyway? An improvisational theater approach to interactive digital storytelling
  
  In this talk I present some of our work on interactive digital storytelling and story generation. A long-term goal of the field of interactive digital storytelling is to be able to build highly interactive fictional worlds in which a user can have the experience of being a character in a story, able to affect its course and outcome. This requires that the events of the story unfold based in part on the user's actions. Branching narrative structures are insufficient for incorporating a substantial amount of user interaction; story content must be expressed using novel procedural and generative (AI-based) representations.
  
  One approach pursued in the field is to use a collection of intelligent, autonomous agents, each playing the role of a story character in a virtual environment. These agents might have emotions, thoughts, goals, and means to achieve their goals, so that they take action in the environment. As in human dramatic improvisation, the story is not predefined, but emerges based on the local interactions of these characters with each other and with the storyworld they inhabit. In order to better understand this emergent narrative approach, we developed The Virtual Storyteller, a multi-agent system that can generate simple stories. For the architecture of the agents, we took lessons from dramatic improvisation. Our goal is to have the agents actually aim for interesting drama, just like human improvisers do. As a first step, we gave the agents means to introduce flexibility in their behavior choices. Most notably, they can improvise properties of objects and characters in the storyworld as they go, so they can affect which actions are possible and which goals can be adopted. Architecturally, we made a distinction between two roles that the agent simultaneously plays: (1) that of a self-interested character, living its life in the storyworld, and (2) that of a drama-interested actor, trying to achieve trouble, conflict and emotional impact for its character. This goes beyond previous work on emergent narrative, in which typically only the character role is investigated.
  
  
• 16.15  Presentation by Joris Weijdom (Head of the Research group Virtual Theatre and core teacher at the course Design for Virtual Theatre and Games (DVTG) at the faculty of Theatre, Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). He graduated 1998 with a MA in Interactive multimedia (EMMA-IMM) at the faculty of arts and technology of the HKU and the University of Portsmouth. He has a professional background in 3D animation and interactive media.)
  
  Theatre and Games
  What is physical and virtual space? How can you combine, or mix, them in a theatrical context? What possibilities give new game technologies to a theatre context and vice versa? These questions are subject of the lecture given by Joris Weijdom, head of the Research Group Virtual Theatre. His research focuses on the interplay between creative making processes, performance and (game)technology.
  Together with his team Joris has developed the so called Performance Engine, a system of hard- and software that enables theatre makers to improvise with interactive digital media. In several LABs theatre makers, like Moniek Merx the international known artistic director of Theatre group Max, have experimented with this setup and used the experience in their work. Currently the research group is working on the next phase of implementing so-called Mixed Reality techniques into the context of theatre and performance. The students Design for Virtual Theatre and Games (DVTG) and Theatre Design (TVG) have also produced theatrical installations inspired by the subject of Mixed Reality and the above mentioned questions.
  
  

• 17.15 Drinks