Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera’s research while affiliated with University of Utah and other places

... However, not all game mechanics are deeply rooted in reality; many only crudely imitate natural or social processes. Likewise, every game inherently tells a story, yet many do so only implicitly, limiting the story's affective impact (Cardona-Rivera et al., 2023). Lastly, although we cannot have a game without user interfaces (UIs) and presentation assets, these interactivity components do not always align with the player's sensorimotor needs (Abtahi et al., 2022). ...

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THE MANY LUDONARRATIVE PROFESSIONS OF A LUDIFIED AND NARRATIFIED FUTURE SOCIETY

... More recently, Li et al. (2019) represented artificial let's play commentary as a sequence-to-sequence generation problem, converting video clips to commentary. Prior approaches have attempted to create commentary from logs of in-game actions for both traditional, physical sports games and video games (Kolekar and Sengupta 2006; Graefe 2016; Barot et al. 2017;Ehsan et al. 2018;Lee, Bulitko, and Ludvig 2014;Ehsan et al. 2019). These approaches depend on access to a game's engine or the existence of a publicly accessible logging system. ...

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Automated Let's Play Commentary

... In addition to the approach taken by Felt, inspiration for future declarative approaches to story sifting may be found in the approaches taken by Playspecs [25], which apply regular expressions to the recognition of patterns (sometimes narrative) in gameplay traces but are limited in expressiveness by their inability to capture variable bindings; by prior work on plan recognition in narrative domains [3], some approaches to which closely resemble story sifting from a technical perspective; and by the use of story intention graphs for analogy search between plot structures [7], which could be leveraged for sifting via the analogical comparison of simulation outputs against structural patterns extracted from known-good stories. ...

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Authoring for Story Sifters

... Policy-based Methods [22], [46], [5], [20], [21] Value Function based methods [62], [42], [49], [57], [50] Exploration-process methods [65], [64], [47], [36], [75], [28], [55] Augmentative Level Cooperation [50], [1], [77], [70], [44], [48] Design patterns Integrative Level Cooperation [28], [79], [69], [10], [9], [43], [55] Debative Level Cooperation [55], [32], [26], [18], [15], [6], [5] used in engineering and computer science. In this survey, we summarise the main interactive methods of cooperative reinforcement learning. ...

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A Survey of Collaborative Reinforcement Learning: Interactive Methods and Design Patterns

... Our use of the dyad ''depicted as'' is intentional: Bowser, the axe, the fireball, and the platform are representational game elements [11]. In effect, this means that their depiction on screen is independent of their underlying computational model [83]. At a computational level, game elements exist in terms of the data structures that represent them and the algorithms that manipulate them. 1 For instance, whereas players might recognize Bowser as a character to Remove, the game's software may represent Bowser as an array of connected pixels or (more commonly) as a bounding box-a rectangular area of space that contains a ''solid'' entity [85]. ...

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Aligning story and gameplay through narrative goals

... In a similar work, Smilevski et al. [28] introduced a Sequence-to-Sequence model with separate encoders for visual and narrative components, aiming to generate longer, more human-like stories that go beyond basic image descriptions. Addressing the need for discourse coherence in visual storytelling, Cardona-Rivera and Li [2] introduced PlotShot, a system that generates stories around user-supplied photographs by considering discourse constraints during fabula generation. While these approaches have shown promise in automated storytelling, they often focus on generating short, descriptive narratives or captions rather than longer, structurally complex stories. ...

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Imagining from Images with an AI Storytelling Tool

... Older examples include the research leading up to the game Façde done by Mateas et al [17,18,20], centered around how to design engaging and procedurally generated narratives in games. McCoy et al [21], Cardona-Rivera and Young [2,36] and Samuel et al [30] have continued to build on this research, and take theoretical understanding of narratives from the Who camp and applies it to build or better understand artifacts firmly anchored in the What camp, with the aim of creating more engaging narrative experiences within games. ...

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A Gap in Games Research: Reflecting on Two Camps and a Bridge

... To aid novices in the application of serious games to promote enduser security and privacy management, we first sought design tools to support them in crafting these games. We first created OGrES [6] (Objective, Game rationale, Enforced constraints, and Subject domain) to help novice developers avoid "chocolate-dipped broccoli" [2] design pitfalls by providing an easy to follow method for defining the high-level purpose of a serious game. This purpose, defined using OGrES then acts as a "directional compass for design decisions" [23]. ...

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Promoting End-User Security and Privacy Through Serious Game Development

... In this paper, we propose a new approach to media framing analysis that centers the role of narratives. Castricato et al. (2021) define narratives as stories that convey information, shape perceptions, and influence attitudes and behaviors. Our main goal with this approach is to find repeating story-telling patterns that can help disambiguate and explain high-level framing dimensions. ...

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Media Framing through the Lens of Event-Centric Narratives

... Preservation can be effected via the game's design, e.g. by ''scripting the interactor'' as they fulfill their afforded role in the story [25, p. 79]. It may also be effected by some in-game artificial intelligence (AI) agent orchestrating the experience [26][27][28], which is responsible for monitoring and manipulating the unfolding game to satisfy an input set of authorial goals. For example, in Façade: ...

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Aligning story and gameplay through narrative goals