Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation of the world and the way it feels, behaves, and reacts. This problem partly originates from the goaloriented and cost-effective nature of the game development process, which mostly favors ad hoc solutions for one particular game, rather than investing in concepts like reusability and emergent gameplay. In broader terms, we observe that game worlds miss semantics, and we argue that its deployment has the potential to bring about the consistency missing in their content. Therefore, we present a novel approach aimed at enriching virtual entities in game worlds with information about their roles, how they relate to others, and how they can affect and interact with players, NPCs, and with each other. We discuss several requirements to achieve these goals, and introduce a semantic model to represent game worlds. In order to support and validate this model, we have developed Entika, a framework to facilitate the deployment of semantics during game development, as well as its maintenance during run-time. Furthermore, we briefly discuss several applications that demonstrate the power of this semantic model for game worlds. After careful evaluation of our semantic game world model and framework, we conclude that a semantically rich world representation can substantially assist designers in creating much more consistent game worlds.

Abstract. To increase a player's immersion in the game world, its objects should behave as one would reasonably expect. For this, it is now becoming increasingly clear that what game objects really miss is richer semantics, not eye-catching visuals. Current games' lack of semantics is mostly due to the difficulty of game designers to realize such complex objects. This paper proposes a solution to this problem in the form of services, characterizing classes of game objects. An example of this is the service of a vending machine, which exchanges a coin for a soda. A three-phased methodology is presented to incrementally specify and add services to game objects. This approach has been implemented and validated by means of a prototype system, which enables a simple and intuitive definition of services in an integrated environment. It is concluded that game objects aware of their services facilitate more and better object interaction, therefore improving gameplay as well.

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