Conditions of Engagement in Game Simulation: Contexts of Gender, Culture and Age

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Noble Ralph Ruiz Kathleen Destefano Marc Mintz Jonathan
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

We advocate a research approach to determining the conditions of engagement in game simulation that is a multi-disciplinary cultural and scientific inquiry at the juncture of psychological, artistic, and programming perspectives. What are the factors that cause some people to become enthralled with detail-oriented simulation game-play, while others are captivated by more abstracted, symbolic styles of play? How are the conditions of engagement influenced by gender, culture, and age?

 

Towards the Unification of Intuitive and Formal Game Concepts with Applications to Computer Chess

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Arbiser Ariel
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

A general technique is proposed to deal with the formalization of intuition and human-oriented concepts in competition thinking games like chess, such as defensive play, attack, tactical play, etc. We present a manner of transferring these intuitions, which are in general ambiguous and not well defined, into formal definitions, and then directly to use them in game play. Among other concepts we define notions of attack, threat, defensive play and strategic play. Experiments are made in computer chess to empirically evaluate this technique. There are applications to machine learning, such as the possibility of combining different evaluation functions into a single one. There are also important applications in education such as teaching and evaluation of human players.