Research
I am still looking for multi-agent simulations. Yvan showed me what he did: Tank Wars.
The agents are tank-shaped vehicles equipped with mobile gun turrets. They learn to avoid collisions and fire each other in a two-dimensional maze environment. The tanks' behaviour is controlled by continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN) [Beer 1996] whose parameters are optimized using genetic algorithms.
Other Players is a conference about the multiplayer phenomenon (December 6 - 8, 2004, in Copenhagen).
Combining technical and interface issues to create compelling digital entertainment is in itself a daunting task. In the past years, however, it has become increasingly clear that game designers must also deal with issues formerly thought to belong to fields such as sociology, political science, and architecture. While many early games - think only of Spacewar! - were multiplayer games, more complex game designs have exponentially increased the challenge of handling social dynamics and understanding the many issues arising when players interact on more ambitious scales.The Other Players conference addresses multiplayer issues - massive, large, and small.The possible list of topics includes but is not limited to:
Multiplayer game design Multiplayer/collective aesthetics Social issues in multiplayer gaming Multiplayer interface issues Cheating and grief play History and development of multiplayer games
Those two pictures represents where the CatchBob players went. I am trying to add this as a news layer above the EPFL map...
Coordinates of the EPFL map $maxX = 533715; $maxY = 152714; $minX = 532660; $minY = 152220;
I finally computed old data drawn from CatchBob. The first picture shows our path on the campus. The second depicts the number of area visited (Patrick and I worked on a php file to parse the raw data, then we used R to compute the visualization). As we can see on the second figure, we drew a bounding box that just took into acocunt the area where the players went (this is an issue, we should reconsiderate this because it will not be possible to compare all the groups if we keep this). The third figure shows where player A (above the x axis) and player B (below the x axis) sent their messages.
This is my ultimate statistical guide. It is just a snapshot of a stat summary... It is about how to select statistical tests.
Test1: test if the distribution are normal
shapiro.test(score) If p-value > 0.05 the distribution is not normal
(If not normal, try with the log(score) or with the sqrt(score) : shapiro.test(log(mm)), data are transformed and the normality test is performed another time. If still not normal, try a non-parametric test : kruskall or wilcox)
Test2: variance homosedasticity (to see if variances are equals) If 2 groups: var.test If more thant 2 groups: bartlett
Here: 2 groups (with at and without): var.test(score ~ awareness) The first (score) is the quantitative indicator and the second (awareness) is the factor. Here p-value = 0.492 > 0.10 then variances are equals. That's what we want to perform the variance analysis
(If the homosedasticity test says that the variances are not equals or if the distributions are not normal: wilcox test (2 modalities) or kruskall test (more than 2)
Now we want to test the impacts of the awareness tool on score Since we have ONE factor with TWO modalities, we can perform a STUDENT TEST (if more than 1 factor: ANOVA)
t.test(score ~ awareness, var.equal=T) p.value= 0.04276 . H0 (equals means) is rejected then there is an effect of awareness on score
anova(lm(score ~ awareness)) (if F< 1 we reject in any case of pvalue)
Found his phd thesis: Tracking and Modelling of Team Game Interactions. The author proposes a methodology to analyse the positional data in the context of football game. His motivation is due to:
1. With regard to computer vision, the tracking of sports players from video presents a challenging domain in which many people interact, occlude, make sudden body movements, and move in a non-linear fashion covering a large area of ground. 2. The analysis of positional data from such a system to identify team game interactions is a fascinating research area. Sports games that involve two teams of players provide a rich environment for modelling cooperative, collaborative and adversarial actions of individuals and for modelling the behaviour of the teams as a whole.
Graphic of Beckham's trajectory during a game.:
In addition, the author explains in a entire section what he can do with his methodology:
Capturing the behaviour of a set of sports players would allow many exciting activities to be performed; identifying tactics, predicting future movements, recognising set-plays, identifying teams, and evaluating teamwork.
Plazes is a (yet another) social software based on your location.
Plazes is a new kind of service offering information and interaction with people and PlaZes based on your current location. The idea is, that you are where you are connected. Plazes works without GPS or any kind of other devices and it's absolutely free.
Andy Crabtree (2000) Journal of Mundane Behavior. Remarks on the social organisation of space and place
Human conduct is always situated in a particular space or place yet little is understood about the social organisational relationship between space, place and conduct. In pursuing a sociological line of thought, ordinary conceptions of space have been elaborated such that spaces and places are seen as constructions expressly designed to constrain and shape our lives. While there is much to such notions, the embodied practices and interactional competences in and through which space is socially organised in real-time pass by 'unnoticed'. Drawing on an ethnographic perspective in general, and an ethnomethodological perspective in particular, this paper outlines an approach to the study of the social organisation of space and place from the largely unnoticed point of view of social action.
Unfortunately, we won't be able to make it for the FOAF workshop. Our paper about rss4you was accepted but for various reasons (I am relocating) it's impossible for us to go there, gosh, I feel ashamed with this :(
Crabtree, A. (2003) Informing the Evaluation of Can You See Me Now? in Rotterdam: Runners' and Control Room Work. (.pdf) Technical Report Equator-03-004, Equator.
Can You See Me Now? (Flintham et al. 2003) is a mixed reality mobile game where online players are chased and captured by runners located on the physical streets of a city, in this case, in Rotterdam.Interaction between players and runners is supported behind-thescenes by control room staff, who are responsible for managing the technology and (wherever possible) any troubles that occur. The purpose of this study is to inform a broad evaluation of the games deployment in the wild, in contrast to in a controlled environment such as the laboratory, for example. (...) Various strategies are employed to evaluate Can You See Me Now? ranging from statistical analysis of computer logs to ethnographic observation of the games production, which is the particular focus of this report.
Blascovich, J., Loomis, J., Beall, A., Swinth, K., Hoyt, C., & Bailenson, J.N. (in press). Immersive virtual environment technology as a methodological tool for social psychology
Historically, at least three methodological problems have dogged experimental social psychology: the experimental control/mundane realism tradeoff, lack of replication, and unrepresentative sampling. We argue that immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) can help ameliorate if not solve these methodological problems and, thus, holds promise as a new social psychological research tool.
The FOAF workshop is promising. I am particularly interested by those paper:- Bootstrapping the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining - Keyword Extraction from the Web for FOAF Metadata - Junichiro Mori, Yutaka Matsuo, Mitsuru Ishizuka, Boi Faltings
The workshop on video games and social interaction in Leeds seems pretty interesting. The position papers are available here. I am eager to meet these people.
- Liselott Brunnberg & Oskar Juhlin, Mobility Studio, The Interactive Institute, The Road Rager – Making use of traffic encounters to enhance a mobile gaming experience - Matthew Chalmers and Paul Tennent, University of Glasgow, Recording and Reusing Mobile Game Play - Mary Flanagan and Daniel C. Howe, hunter college/ central saint martins and new york university, :: designing.other :: - Nony Kamm, City University, Socially inclusive online gaming environments - Nicolas Nova and Fabien Girardin, CRAFT/EPFL, Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game Position paper - Darren J. Reed, Department of Computer Science, University of York, The Flow-test: a method for understanding the good conversation - Richard Sandford and Ben Williamson, NESTA, Racing Academy - Eben Upton, Intel Research Cambridge, Realtime Multiplayer Games over Mobile Networks - Greg Wadley, Martin Gibbs, Connor Graham, Kevin Hew, University of Melbourne and Iron Monkey Studios, Virtual game spaces as 'third places': a metaphor for understanding and designing for the voice channel
The paper I wrote with Roberto for the FOAF Workshop has been accepted: rss4you: Web-Based Syndication Enhanced with Social Navigation
Abstract: this paper describes rss4you a web-based news aggregator that provides users with a social navigation feature. It aims at augmenting current syndication by using an alternative information navigation model: relying on others' activities. The cornerstone of rss4you consists of a voting system that allow you to rate the RSS feeds you syndicate. All users hence have a list of their favorite RSS feeds he/she can share with others (in an OPML format). Based on this favorite list, the system retrieves users with close interests (based on the similarity of their feeds weighted with the ratings) and hence recommends you RSS feeds syndicated by users with close interests. A list of the most popular RSS feeds is also provided. The system, though in beta version is used to test various concepts of social navigation.
One of the weakness of my research lays in the fact that we are using non-realistic situations. Though CatchBob is a game in a virtual environment, the collaborative hunt players are engaged in is not a realistic situation. It is just a firefighter-like task. This issue (the use of field study or experimental setting) has been tackled by B. Cahour in "Cooperative interaction analysis: the use of post-verbalisations ":
Since the objective was to compare the communication with extended shared context and with restricted shared context, we needed to build comparable situations of cooperation, the subjects being in a comparable situation of co- operation except for the media.
A similar situation applied for a study we are developing about the memory of cooperative interactions: to test first the methodology which would be needed to study the representation of past cooperative interactions, and to check the variability of the descriptions given just after an interaction and again a year later, we asked nine pairs of subjects to perform a similar collaborative design task. We were then able to observe if there are a large number of individual differences or if there are similarities in what the subjects remembered of a cooperative interaction.
It is in both cases the scientific issue of looking at the differences between situations or between subjects which led us to build experimental settings for co-operative interaction. The results obtained from these studies need of course to be confirmed in real work situations.
Since CatchBob is a collaborative hunt, I tried to type this set of keywords in Google and I got this paper:Co-operation and Communication in Apes and Humans by Ingar Brinck and Peter Gärdenfors
We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co-operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for future-directed co-operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co-operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future-directed co-operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and context-independent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of co-operating in game-theoretic terms and submit that the co-operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions
This afternoon I worked on the visualization of CatchBob's players interactions. I drew (by hand gosh) this SVG file that shows the number of messages each of the players sent to his or her partners. The width of each bezier curve is proportional to the number of messages sent.
Video Surveillance as a gaming platform is a project carried out by Bernd Hitzeroth and Myriel Milicevic at interaction design institute in Ivrea.
Surveillance camera systems work increasingly digital and are connected through Local Area Networks to PCs. This allows for the availability of surveillance footage via the Internet. Through image processing technologies (motion detection, face recognition, colour tracking, mapping 3D space through 2D images) real-time augmentation is now possible. Combined, these technologies can become the basis for an interactive gaming environment. (...) We want to establish a gaming platform, which is based on real time footage, connected to real spaces. The games will be played on home computers and receive live streams from remote surveillance cameras over the Internet. The player becomes an active agent in the surveyed world, experiencing a feeling of control and yet an uncertainty of what is fiction and what is real.
