Although we use the word “playing” to say what people do with games, most of what people are doing in games is solving problems. If we understand how people play games, we understand how people solve problems Researchers at The University of Minnesota used a simple tower defense game to study how people learn from experience, generalize that experience to new problems, represent and reason about space and time, use strategies and differ from their fellow game players
In this talk, we explain how GopherTD, a Unity-based clone of the popular Vector TD tower defense game, was used to study human behavior, how studying human behavior helped develop temporo-spatial reasoning capabilities for AI players and how that artificial intelligence helps us design better games.
Professor Baylor Wetzel is head of the GopherTD project. He teaches in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the The University of Minnesota and is a member of the Center for Cognitive Science; the AI, Robotics and Vision Laboratory and the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. He formerly worked at Shikigami Games and Alelo, a serious games company.
Martin Grider will talk about his first six months as an independent iPhone game creator. He’ll compare and contrast the two games he released at the tail end of 2012 – a puzzle game called Oppo-Citrus, and a board game conversion project, For The Win – both from a postmortem perspective and with some detailed iOS development specifics.
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