Today is the Video Gaming Research Symposium at the University of Toronto that deals with video gaming research and issues dealing with distributed systems support, middleware, HCI and animation, artificial intelligence, video gaming design and course education, social research, psychology and spatial cognition, cognitive gaming research, individual and group behaviour, and legal ramifications. Attendees from academia and industry came together to discuss and listen to leading video gaming research.
Some interesting research talks that struck me were the following. The first talk was on character motion content models for motion editing and interactive visualization, by Patrick Coleman. In video game design, character animation is being done to mimic human movements to make it more realistic. In this talk, the purpose was to use content to solve video gaming problems which involves using poses for motion editing. This led right into creating models for learning motions in order to generate new motions based on training data called Data-driven character animation, presented by Professor Aaron Hertzmann of DGP. The idea is to "learn" from movement of pose models and how specifying certain points on poses allows for more natural movement rather than having to specify all points on the body to move. Another aspect is non-photorealistic animation which involves whether we can make games with visual styles of traditional artistic media.
Another talk dealt with AI research application to video games. One talk was on Practical AI modules for development of non-player characters in video games by Stavros Vassos. Current video game developers create their own "thinking" function for what a non-player character should do which is generally a finite state automaton (FSA) and is generally coded in C++. The "thinking" function can also be implemented as an AI agent which abstracts this using cognitive robotics. In this way, the AI agent is plugged into the video gaming engine. There is few AI research that is being used in video games.
What does it take to design a video game and how can video game companies hire the best students? This is where Steve Engels talked about designing a video gaming course at the undergrad level and how to address the drop in enrollment of CS students as well as few females in CS. Video gaming may be one example that can entice students to consider CS as a discipline to study and build a CS career. The challenge is that video game design is a collaborative discipline that deal with many CS and non-CS fields: AI, graphics, systems, psychology, sociology, and HCI. According to Steve: "video game design is the lure, but breeding CS is the goal".
Another aspect of video games is its social impact. Tracy Kennedy, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology from U of T talked about "What can social research tell us about the non-traditional gamer". In here, she discussed about her cultural studeis of virtual worlds. She has many virtual avatars in virtual worlds and she is studying role playing in massively multiplayer online games using ethnographic research, content analysis, surveys, interviews and network analysis. One of the things is that gaming helps to have the family spend time with each other, and there are moms who are active gamers. She studied women gamers in the XBox Live forum called GamerChiX and using content and network analysis, she discovered that there was a lot of activity and support, and there was one instance where one post received many comments. It was evident that community was important to female gamers. Another thing that I suggested as a question to her was looking into social interactions through chat logs in online games such as the work done by Nic Ducheneaut from PARC.
Ian Spence from the Department of Psychology provided the next talk on spatial cognition and video games. His lab did an experiment with non-gamers and gamers where they were given cognitive tasks to see if gamers perform better at spatial cognition than non-gamers. The non-gamers were given video game training and then they did a user field of view experiment and mental rotation test. They found that non-gamers did in fact improve their user field of view and mental rotation after playing video games, which would sound intuitive. They are also looking into measuring electrical activity in the brain in response to video games and looking at how seniors could improve their user field of view by playing video games in order for them to reduce accidents. As well, they have also begun work to designing mobile phone games using first person shooter.
Following along this cognitive research path, Kevin Tonon and Ron Baecker from KMDI at the University of Toronto talked about Internet-based cognitive enrichment communities for research on mental aging interventions. Ron talked about how we could slow down cognitive decline using video games in order to improve mental fitness (like Scrabulous which a lot of people play, myself included on Facebook) and find interventions to make cognitive fitness become more fun and enjoyable. They are building a web site to support cognitive and social stimulation games online to allow for research randomization and data collection. Kevin then talked about the technical details for creating this web site and hosted games involving game authoring where anyone can design or author a game using a hybrid approach of domain specific language and GUI. He gave an example of designing a chess board application.
Jonathan Freedman then looked at the obvious question do violent video games cause aggression and violent crime. There is a study from Anderson and Dill that is cited the most in the literature, but has no convincing evidence that violent video games do cause aggression. For most video gamers, they know that what they are doing is not real. However, for those that have psychological, family or social problems, then this is where violent video games may have an effect.
The final presentation dealt with virtual property and real law by Susan Abramovitch. With virtual worlds like Second Life, people are creating and collecting virtual property and creating a virtual market for the consumption, production and exchange of virtual goods just like in the real physical economic market. Virtual property is similar to physical property. Virtual currency in fact can be exchanged for physical currency. For example, Linden dollars which is the virtual currency in Second Life, can be exchanged for US dollars. There have been cases where real world laws were applicable to virtual intellectual property. For example, a company was able to sue a Second Life user for selling their virtual property that was not theirs, and vice versa, where a user successfully sued a company for not protecting his virtual rights when his virtual property was stolen by another user. She concluded that legal aspects of commerce in virtual property will become more important if it has not already.
All in all, it was a good showing of different aspects of video gaming research from various disciplines, and made me open up my eyes to other areas of research in video games. I am not an avid video gamer, but I know I am getting really addicted to the Nintendo Wii because I love the engagement of your body into the games, rather than just sitting at your computer and playing. That is why I am more into the Wii than any other gaming console.
On Technorati: video gaming research, UofT
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