Table of Contents
Ludic Computing (CO245)
Ludic Computing is the study of the design, construction and evaluation of computer systems for play. Computers support a huge range of playful and creative activities: from video games and interactive art, to tools for creative expression and playful exploration; as artificial players of games, and as creators in their own right. It is a highly interdisciplinary area with links to many other fields, including Graphics, Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence.
This module covers a range of topics in Ludic Computing, concentrating on three main themes:
- Content Generation: computational techniques for generating aesthetic content
- Game Agents: building artificial game-playing agents
- Players: designing systems to support human players
In Spring 2012 Ludic Computing is being taught by Simon Colton and Alison Pease. The course was originally developed by Simon Colton and Jeremy Gow. There is a more detailed syllabus given below.
The following books are not required reading, but provide additional context to the course:
- Buckland: Programming Game AI by Example. Wordware, 2005. ISBN 1556220782.
- Salen & Zimmerman: Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0262240459.
- Strothotte and Schlechtweg: Non-Photorealistic Computer Graphics: Modeling, Rendering and Animation. Morgan Kaufmann, 2002. ISBN 1558607870.
Lectures and Tutorials
This lecture course is available for third year undergraduates and MSc. (Computing Science/Specialism) students. The lectures for this course are at 4pm and 5pm on Thursday in room 311. There will be one tutorial per week, at 2pm on Friday in room 145.
Tutorials
- Tutorial 6: Understanding Play (2/3) Questions (No answers supplied)
Lecture Notes
We will put the final lecture notes for the lectures here on the Monday before the lectures. We have decided not to hand out printed copies of the notes - so please print your own copies if you so wish.
- Lecture 1: Introduction (19/1) PDF
- Lecture 2: Computational Creativity (19/1) PDF
- Lectures 3 and 4: Evolutionary Design (26/1) PDF
- Lectures 5 and 6: Design Grammars (2/2) PDF
- Lectures 7 and 8: Non-Photorealistic Rendering (9/2) PDF Textbook Extracts
- Lecture 9: Steering Behaviours (16/2) PDF
- Lecture 11: Behaviour Trees (23/2) PDF
- Lecture 12: Adaptive Games (23/2) PDF
- Lecture 13: Interactive Play (1/3) PDF
- Lecture 14: Designing for Play (1/3) PDF
- Lecture 15: Social Networks (8/3) Slides here
- Lecture 16: Monte Carlo Tree Search (8/3) PDF
- Lecture 17: Revision Lecture (15/3) PDF
Required reading
We may examine you on material from the following papers:
Lazarro (2004) Why we play games: Four keys to more emotion without story PDF
Brown & Cairns (2004) A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion PDF
Costikyan (2002) I Have No Words & I Must Design:Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games PDF
Syllabus
Content Generation
Evolutionary Design: evolutionary search, coding, parameter vs. program evolution, fitness functions, elitism, truncation, fitness proportionate selection, tournament selection, intermediate populations, one and two point crossover, tree crossover, parameter and program mutation, evolving buildings, evolving shape grammars, the Avera system
Shape Grammars: context free grammars, random generation, shape grammars, the CFDG language, visual arts applications
L-Systems: L-systems, the LSystem language, vegetation/terrain modelling, city generation (CityEngine, Subversion)
Image Filtering: transforms (median, threshold, lookup, convolution), compositors (arithmetic, extremal, binary), filter trees
Non-Photorealistic Rendering: brush paths, simulating natural media, image segmentation, boundary smoothing, active contours, bezier curves, rendering colour regions, painting interfaces
Computational Creativity: definitions and aims, artefact generation (evolutionary programming, case-based methods, conceptual blending), creative methodologies (analogical reasoning, combining systems, creative responsibility), assessing creativity, artefacts vs. process, Ritchie’s measures, The Wundt curve
Game Agents
Steering Behaviours: reactive vs. planned movement, the steered agent model, seek/flee, arrive, pursue/evade, modes and blends, weighted and prioritised blends, emergent behaviour, flocking
Pathfinding: pathfinding queries, navigation graphs, A* for pathfinding, cluster heuristic, HPA*, A* variations, resource limitations, pre-computed paths, division schemes, tiles, waypoints, navigation meshes, path smoothing
Behaviour Trees: FSM-driven behaviour, behaviour trees (conditions, actions, selectors, sequences, decorators), concurrency, semaphore guards, behaviour blackboards, reuse, limitations
Adaptive Games: action prediction, N-grams, hierarchical N-grams, Q-learning, dynamic difficulty adjustment, adaptive pacing, adaptive content
Monte Carlo Tree Search: The basic MCTS algorithm, MCTS and UCT, strengths and drawbacks, game-specific and game-independent enhancements, open research topics
Players
Interactive Play: conceptualising player experience, emotion (Norman, Lazzaro), pleasure (Tiger, LeBlanc, Koster), immersion, the immersive fallacy, flow
Designing for Play: defining games (Suits, Costikyan), gameplay, meaningful play, story vs. intention, benefits design, MDA design, measures of experience, CEGE model
Social Networks: social games, Milgram’s small world experiment, social networks, centrality, structural properties, random networks, small world networks, scale free networks, growth and diffusion, ludic applications
Assessment
The course will be assessed by an exam and a single coursework.
Coursework
The deadline for the coursework is Thursday 8th March, 2012.
Coursework description: pdf
Coursework sketchbook: zip
Slides on general feedback: pdf. Any reports not collected in the lecture have been returned to the teaching office - please pick them up from there.
Exam
The old summer exam papers are available to students here (you will need your DoC login and password). In particular, see 2010-11 and 2009-10.
Previous MEng. tests are not available - students should see the old summer exam papers for guidance. The MEng test will have one question, to be completed in 50 minutes (there are no optional questions on the paper).
Contact
Please contact Alison Pease: apease AT doc.ic.ac.uk if you have any questions. It would help if you put Ludic Computing in the title of your email.