Sebastiaan Meijer

Procedural content generation for games: A survey

Hundreds of millions of people play computer games every day. For them, game content—from 3D objects to abstract puzzles—plays a major entertainment role. Manual labor has so far ensured that the quality and quantity of game content matched the demands of the playing community, but is facing new scalability challenges due to the exponential growth over the last decade of both the gamer population and the production costs. Procedural Content Generation for Games (PCG-G) may address these challenges by automating, or aiding in, game content generation. PCG-G is difficult, since the generator has to create the content, satisfy constraints imposed by the artist, and return interesting instances for gamers. Despite a large body of research focusing on PCG-G, particularly over the past decade, ours is the first comprehensive survey of the field of PCG-G. We first introduce a comprehensive, six-layered taxonomy of game content: bits, space, systems, scenarios, design, and derived. Second, we survey the methods used across the whole field of PCG-G from a large research body. Third, we map PCG-G methods to game content layers; it turns out that many of the methods used to generate game content from one layer can be used to generate content from another. We also survey the use of methods in practice, that is, in commercial or prototype games. Fourth and last, we discuss several directions for future research in PCG-G, which we believe deserve close attention in the near future.

The organisation of transactions: studying supply networks using gaming simulation.

This book studies the organisation of transactions in supply networks. More specifically it investigates the influence of social structure on the mode of organisation in supply networks. To gain new insights, the results in this book have been gathered using gaming simulation as a research method. As this is a new application of gaming simulation, special attention is paid to the methodological implications.

Trust and Tracing game: learning about transactions and embeddedness in a trade network

This paper introduces a gaming simulation, the Trust and Tracing game, for learning about the relation between social structure and the co-ordination of transactions in a trade network. This paper describes experiences from 15 sessions with the game. Its model allows the use of network and market coordination mechanisms by participating groups. During debriefing participants typically indicated they learned that prior relationships were more important to the course of the session than economic theory predicts. Number of participants, language barriers, nationality, perceived group membership, and prior experience determined which transaction governance mechanism emerged in the game.

Gaming Rail Cargo Management: Exploring and Validating Alternative Modes of Organization

Stakeholders in the Netherlands’ rail cargo sector exhibit strategic behavior that causes irregularity and unpredictability in freight trains. This leads to the suboptimal use of scarce rail capacity. The authors present the results of a research project that used gaming to explore and validate alternative organizational methods for the management of rail cargo capacity with decision makers and subject matter experts from ProRail, the Netherlands’ railway infrastructure manager. Various scenarios for the organization of rail cargo capacity management were played out, tested, and extensively debriefed in three project phases. The gaming sessions demonstrated that open information sharing among stakeholders does not depend on the introduction of price mechanisms and is, indeed, a more effective way of managing capacity. The authors conclude that it is vital to introduce gaming gradually and build up organizational acceptance for this method. However, once acceptance has been achieved, gaming can generate valuable insight into strategic behavior and the performance of sociotechnical infrastructures.

Modelling trade and trust across cultures

Misunderstandings arise in international trade due to difference in cultural background of trade partners. Trust and the role it plays in trade are influenced by culture. Considering that trade always involves working on the relationship with the trade partner, understanding the behaviour of the other is of the essence. This paper proposes to involve cultural dimensions in the modelling of trust in trade situations. A case study is presented to show a conceptualisation of trust with respect to the cultural dimension of performance orientation versus cooperation orientation.

The 2014 International Planning Competition: Progress and Trends

We review the 2014 International Planning Competition (IPC-2014), the eighth in a series of competitions starting in 1998. IPC-2014 was held in three separate parts to assess state-of-the-art in three prominent areas of planning research: the deterministic (classical) part (IPCD), the learning part (IPCL), and the probabilistic part (IPPC). Each part evaluated planning systems in ways that pushed the edge of existing planner performance by introducing new challenges, novel tasks, or both. The competition surpassed again the number of competitors than its predecessor, highlighting the competition’s central role in shaping the landscape of ongoing developments in evaluating planning systems.

Gaming Simulations for Railways: Lessons Learned from Modeling Six Games for the Dutch Infrastructure Management

Gaming Simulations for Railways : Lessons Learned from Modeling Six Games for the Dutch Infrastructure Management

The Power of Sponges

Background. Innovation in transport systems has a need for simulated environments to experiment with new configurations, ideas, and solutions. Gaming is one such environment. This article applies the approach to the context of capacity allocation and traffic control innovation in the Dutch railway system. Both high-tech and low-tech games are built and applied. Aim and method. By comparing cases using low-tech and high-tech games for innovation in a related bundle of projects in the railway sector, this article aims to identify different patterns emerging from a retrospective cross case comparison. The cases aimed at testing and assessing various ideas about the innovation process through high- and low-tech gaming. Results. The high-tech cases were used to generate more quantitative data, for purposes where a concept had to be tested that has been formulated at a higher level of detail. It shows that, despite the higher precision, fidelity of high-tech simulators was not necessarily better than that of low-tech cases. None of the cases were set up to formally accept or reject hypotheses, but followed the typical innovation logic of testing and assessing ideas early in the process. Conclusions. The numerous qualitative data, gathered during the gaming sessions, illustrated the benefits and drawbacks of high- and low-tech gaming. The real world decisions made by the client, based on the gaming sessions, show that the scope of the project was broader than merely an intervention in an existing transport system. Low-tech games showed to be useful for dealing with rapid systems development (prototyping). They allow flexible role settings, varying rules, and resources. High-tech games did not provide obvious fidelity advantages, but yielded more quantitative data suitable for analysis. Recommendations. The article identifies the need for a new methodological approach: gaming supporting system/organization design.

A chain game for distributed trading and negotiation

This position paper introduces a simulation gaming environment for enacting a production network. The environment aims to be an integrative laboratory for investigating supply networks, as well as being a versatile training tool. The primary focus is on food production networks. The environment enables a number of teams of participants, each representing one actor in a food chain, to conduct business together. The teams can have the role of auction, co-operation, wholesaler, factory, retail chain, and retail outlet. Producers and consumers are either enacted or simulated. The game leaders freely determine the products and production methods in each run of the game. The gaming environment takes performance, process and institutional aspects of chains into account. It is particularly suited for investigating issues of sustainability and trust. Currently the gaming environment is under development. The paper presents version 1B. This version can be found at http://www.chaingame.org. It runs on the Web, enabling to model distributed chains.

Using gaming simulation experiments to test railway innovations: implications for validity

Gaming simulation in the railway sector often uses the same conceptual model as in computer simulation, and enables operators to interact with this model during a simulation run. Therefore, gaming simulation validation poses different challenges. This paper aims to answer the question to what extent gaming simulation can be used as an experimental research setting, due to its loosely demarcated experimental features. Focusing on validity issues, we study five cases in which the Dutch railway sector used gaming simulation to test innovations in a controlled environment. The results show that in addition to traditional external validity issues, human game players inherently open up this controlled environment, bringing in many confounding variables. By signaling what the specific validity threats are, this paper strives to improve gaming simulation for testing innovations that tackle social and technical elements of a system.