Designing Semantic Game Worlds

Abstract

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.

Extracting Semantic-Based Video Game Characters Information from Social Media Platforms

“…authentic sandbox games). Current work in using semantics in games focuses on the use of semantic information to generate game worlds or to describe interactions with game worlds such as the work in [27,29,40]. Although these provide useful insights in generic semantic models that describe interactions with game worlds, they do not offer vocabularies for describing game content such as game characters and they neither provide a generic approach for reusing Web content to generate games.…”

Understanding everything NPCs can do

“…The concept of an object taxonomy is not new, and has been used in previous work [5,20,21]. These object taxonomies classify the game world into di erent categories, with the implicit understanding that each category is given a di erent purpose in that world.…”

A holistic approach for semantic-based game generation

“…authentic sandbox games). Current work in using semantics in games focuses on the use of semantic information to generate game worlds or to describe interactions with game worlds such as the work in [21], [28], [38]. Although these provide useful insights in generic semantic models that describe interactions with game worlds, they do not offer vocabularies for describing game content and they neither provide a generic approach for reusing Web content to generate games.…”

“…Once all game content has been parsed and classified, gaming information can be structured in RDF using common vocabularies such as SKOS 21 for describing knowledge organization systems (such as thesauri) concepts, Dublin Core 22 for describing provenance information, FOAF 23 for describing information about people, SIOC 24 for interlinking different online communities together, and Review vocabulary 25 for describing review information, amongst other vocabularies. However, new ontologies, that describe game levels or game design would be required to define new concepts which are not found in current semantic vocabularies.…”