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Feb 15 2012

UCSC's Prom Week game nominated for gaming awards

Santa Cruz Sentinel (California)

Prom Week, an online computer game developed by a team of students and faculty at UC Santa Cruz, has been nominated for a technical excellence award at the Indie Games Festival.

The game is about social relationships driven by an artificial intelligence system that enables players to shape the social lives of a group of 18 high school students.

"This was AI-based game design, so the challenge was to create a model of social interaction and then turn it into a game that's vibrant and fun to play," said lead developer Josh McCoy, a graduate student in the Baskin School of Engineering who led the development of the artificial intelligence system at the core of the game.

At the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco, the game is also in the running for the audience choice award, and a special preview release of the game has been made available on the team's website.

The game's official release was Tuesday, when it was made be available to play for free on Facebook and other web platforms.

In the game, each "level" is a different character's story, and the player is presented with goals for the character, such as getting a date with that cute boy in algebra class. The game's AI system not only generates an interaction appropriate to those characters, it also keeps track of evolving relationships among characters as the game proceeds.

"What the characters say to each other and how they respond is dependent on this growing back story of interactions that the player has caused to happen," said Michael Mateas, associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering and director of the Center for Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz.

The social simulation in Prom Week is based in large part on a set of 5,000 social considerations or "rules" that determine what characters want to do and how they respond to the actions of others. To come up with those rules, the team studied social interactions in movies and television shows.

Other groups at the Center for Games and Playable Media are already adapting Prom Week's AI system for use in other games, including games for teaching conflict resolution and for cultural training purposes.

The work on Prom Week was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

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