DIVISION OF GAMES RESEARCH, SCHOLARSHIP AND CREATIVE WORK
The Division of Games faculty and students pursue research in a number of areas, including games for health, games for learning and training, modeling and simulation, and Game AI. Our established collaborations with other departments at the University provides a unique opportunity for research experiences both in “core” game development/design and in integrative work connecting games scholarship with a range of fields such as dance, informal science education, rehabilitation medicine, forensic science, and national security intelligence analysis. Both our lecturing and tenure-line faculty are recognized leaders in games scholarship, with significant and sustained sponsored projects, impactful research publications, graduates placed at top-ranked academic and industry institutions and leadership service in international scholarly and professional organizations.
GROUPS AND LABS
The GApp Lab
The Liquid Narrative Group
The STAGE Group
Practice-driven research examining the collision space between simulation and games, merging the two domains' tools, pipelines, and cultures.
Ryan Bown, Mark van Langeveld
PROJECTS
Automated Cinematography
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Automated Dungeon Mastering
Creating an AI agent capable of running a tabletop role-playing game as a dungeon-master.
Diabetes Awareness
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Decompositional Planning
Combining hierarchical reasoning and least-commitment refinement reasoning in a unified knowledge representation and a sound and complete reasoning procedure.Rogelio Cardona-Rivera
Determinants of Player Choice
Studying what influences players when they make choices in video games.
Drone Commander
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The Game Ontology Project
Developing a framework for describing, analyzing and studying games -- a hierarchy of concepts abstracted from an analysis of many specific games. GOP borrows concepts and methods from prototype theory as well as grounded theory to achieve a framework that is always growing and changing as new games are analyzed or particular research questions are explored.
HR Training Tools
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Intelligent Game Architectures
Building architectures for game experiences that facilitate the integration of compute-intensive symbolic AI systems with existing commercial game engines.
Plot Expressivity
Increasing expressive range in the generative capacity of efficient story planning systems. Characters’ dynamic intentions, the performance of actions that fail, and the modeling of characters’ mistaken beliefs and how those false beliefs lead to more compelling stories.
Procedural Puzzle Rooms
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS AND SCHOLARLY ARTIFACTS
- Justus Robertson, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, and R. Michael Young; Invisible Dynamic Mechanic Adjustment in Virtual Reality Games. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality, pages 282-289, Online, 2020 URL Paper: http://qed.cs.utah.edu/content/3-publications/robertson2020invisible.pdf Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHjz56kPCIs
- Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, José P. Zagal, and Michael S. Debus; GFI: A Formal Approach to Narrative Design and Game Research. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2020), Online, 2020 URL Paper: http://qed.cs.utah.edu/content/3-publications/cardona-rivera2020gfi.pdf Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdfP4xp33Ug
- Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera; Foundations of a Computational Science of Game Design: Abstractions and Tradeoffs. In Proceedings of the 16th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2020), 2020 URL Paper: http://qed.cs.utah.edu/content/3-publications/cardona-rivera2020foundations.pdf Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7Eu4O6zBh4
- Monthir Ali and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera; Comparing Gamepad and Naturally-mapped Controller Effects on Perceived Virtual Reality Experiences. In Proceedings of 2020 ACM Symposium on Applied Perception (SAP 2020), 2020 URL Paper: http://rogel.io/content/2-publications/ali2020comparing.pdf
- Chris Martens, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, and Neil Cohn; The Visual Narrative Engine: A Computational Model of the Visual Narrative Architecture. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS 2020), Palo Alto, CA, USA, 2020 URL Paper: http://rogel.io/content/2-publications/martens2020vne.pdf