Games

We explore fully autonomous companion characters within the context of Real Time Strategy games. Non-player Characters that are controlled by Artificial Intelligence to some degree, have been a feature of Role Playing games for decades. RTS games rarely have a player avatar, and thus no real companions. The universe of RTS games where both an avatar and a companion character exist is small. Most friendly RTS units are semi autonomous at best, requiring player micromanagement of their behavior.

Video games, entertainment, education, and training media have been developed for many years, and eliciting emotional experiences is an integral part of that process. Production and editing of the media in order to produce the desired emotional experiences can be expensive and cumbersome to media de- signers. This paper presents a pilot study intended to show that such experiences can be induced with after-the-fact audio-visual effects. As subjects of the us- er study, players are given the same virtual environment with two emotional states: fear, and peace.

The Global Game Jam® is the world’s largest game creation event, a physical jam that is held annually for eight years now. The 48-hour activity brings together game design enthusiasts in over 90 countries around the world for a weekend of experimentation. The organization facilitates tens of thousands of jam registrations every year, and thousands of responses to its annual survey. In this paper, we analyze Global Game Jam using multiple largely unexamined sources of data. We produce and discuss some key observations supported by the evidence.