Tag: Vol 7. No. 2 (2024)

Hana Pravdová, Monika Cihlářová

ABSTRACT:
Sid Meier’s Civilization is one of the most prominent game franchises thanks to its distinct contribution to the strategy game genre. This is evidenced by the game’s inclusion as one of the few games in the World Video Game Hall of Fame. The games in the franchise feature significant replayability, allowing designers to standardize game mechanics that were typical of high-end AAA titles. Innovation, which is more often associated with low development costs, is becoming less common in the game mechanics of high-cost titles. However, original designer Sid Meier set a rule of thirds in development – keep a third of the original game components, improve a third, and innovate a third, thus emphasizing game innovation. The resulting products should deliver innovative mechanics that retain original players while captivating new ones. The purpose of the case study is to evaluate the quality of the innovative game mechanics of the Sid Meier’s Civilization digital game series within the genre and series. The innovativeness and the methods that lead designers to use them can serve as an example for other studios developing strategy games at a time when interest in strategic planning among gamers is declining.

KEY WORDS:
AAA, design, game mechanics, innovation, Sid Meier’s Civilization, strategy game.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.110-129

Anshika Garg, Jyoti Prakash Pujari, Aditi Namboothiri

ABSTRACT:
Fang Ray-shin, a Taiwanese teenager during the White Terror, faces a harrowing choice: expose her classmates in a forbidden book club or remain silent, a decision that highlights the pervasive surveillance of the era, where silence equates to betrayal. This moral dilemma lies at the heart of Red Candle Games’ Detention, a digital game that immerses players in the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust prevalent in Taiwan under martial law. Alongside its successor, Devotion, these games are meticulously crafted narratives that reflect the paranoia and psychological trauma caused by constant monitoring. While existing studies have explored the historical context of these games, they often overlook their engagement with Foucault’s surveillance theories presented in Discipline and punish. This study bridges this gap by analysing the games as virtual representations of Taiwan during the 1960s-80s, investigating the portrayal of historical events under authoritarian rule and the concept of ‘playable surveillance’. This paper also argues that these games challenge and reinforce players’ perceptions of agency, morality, and resistance in the face of systemic oppression.

KEY WORDS:
Detention, Devotion, Discipline and punish, Michel Foucault, surveillance, White Terror.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.64-79

Georgios Liapis, Ioannis Vlahavas

ABSTRACT:
Gaming technology’s potential extends beyond entertainment, providing a powerful platform for learning and evaluation, and for that, NPCs with static movement and conversation behaviours are often used. To make them more human-like and emulate actions, technologies such as artificial intelligence are utilized. This work proposes smart NPCs to imitate personality traits in a serious escape room setting. For their development, labelled personality profiles are normally required from human players to define their standard behaviours. As this is rather difficult, deep reinforcement learning is a feasible and effective alternative for generating the necessary dataset. Each NPC is an AI agent that simulates a specific personality according to the OCEAN 5 model. Our escape room environment also includes Raven-inspired intelligence tests and a custom communication system that allows the development of smart NPC teams. Analysis of gameplay data and metrics uncovered behavioural patterns affecting performance, stability, and task completion times. Such progress has potential across multiple digital game types for smart NPCs with specific personality, as well as for the creation of standard gameplay style profiles that can be used for players’ assessment.

KEY WORDS:
agents, deep reinforcement learning, machine learning, NPC, serious games.

DOI:
10.34135/actaludologica.2024-7-2.4-25

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