Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

The Mimesis Effect: The Effect of Roles on Player Choice in Interactive Narrative Role-Playing Games

We present a study that investigates the heretofore unexplored relationship between a players sense of her narrative role in an interactive narrative role-playing game and the options she selects when faced with choice structures during gameplay. By manipulating a players knowledge over her role, and examining in-game options she preferred in choice structures, we discovered what we term the Mimesis Effect: when players were explicitly given a role, we found a significant relationship between their role and their in-game actions; participants role-play even if not instructed to, exhibiting a preference for actions consistent with their role. Further, when players were not explicitly given a role, participants still role-played -- they were consistent with an implicit role -- but did not agree on which role to implicitly be consistent with. We discuss our findings and broader implications of our work to both game development and games research.

A community college blended learning classroom experience through Artificial Intelligence in Games

We report on the experience of teaching an industry-validated course on Artificial Intelligence in Computer Games within the Simulation and Game Design department at a two-year community college during a 16-week semester. The course format used a blended learning just-in-time teaching approach, which included active learning programming exercises and one-on-one student interactions. Moskals Attitudes Toward Computer Science survey showed a positive and significant increase in students in both interest (W(10) = 25, p = 0.011) and professional (W(10) = 49.5, p = 0.037) constructs. The Felder-Soloman Index of Learning Styles (n = 14) failed to identify any statistically significant differences in learning styles when compared to a four-year CS1 class. In the final class evaluation, 8 out of 13 students (62%) strongly or very strongly preferred the blended learning approach. We validated this course through four semi-structured interviews with game companies. The interview results suggest that companies are strongly favorable to the course content and structure. The results of this work serve as a template that community colleges can adopt for their curriculum.

Generating Abstract Comics

We investigate a new approach to comic generation that explores the process of generating the contents of a panel given the contents of all previous panels. Our approach is based on leading discourse theories for comics by McCloud (panel transitions) and Cohn (narrative grammar), unified by cognitive theories of inference in visual language. We apply these theories to comics whose panel parameters are abstract geometric shapes and their positions, contributing a computational realization of McCloud’s and Cohn’s comics theories, as well as a modular algorithm that affords further experimentation and evaluation of visual discourse theories.