Cognition

Cognition and games is how we develop theories for modeling and simulating computer characters and story, develop methods for modeling, simulating and displaying human emotion, theories for analyzing large-scale game play, and theories for influshing pedagogy with story in the interactive medium of games.

 

Cognition and games work includes:

 

• Computer generated autonomy,

• Modeling, simulating and displaying human emotion,

• Understanding & analysis,

• Pedagogy/story integration,

• Game play innovation.

 

Computer generated autonomy is the question of how we model human and organizational behavior in our networked games. If we think of taking the technology from a game like The- Sims and deploying it for serious purpose, such as a training aid for nursing, we then have the potential to model and simulate, in game form, hospital operations and provide an immersive experience for the nurse trainee. Computer generated story is a long time hard question but the fundamental question is how do we model story computationally such that we can build engines and tool suites that dramatically simplify the deployment of a new story for our networked game.

 

Modeling and simulation of human emotion is the frontier for networked games and simulations. For the entertainment world, the future of gaming includes developing the immersive gaming experience such that it causes an emotional impact on the player. For the military, homeland security and defense, and hospital trauma worlds, we need a similar game-based simulation capability. The fundamental question is how do we model human emotion such that we can author emotional experiences in game form in a controlled and appropriate manner? There are strong requirements for such a capability across the spectrum of entertainment and serious game developers and it is critical that we perform the research on this such that we understand the potential human impact.

 

Understanding and analysis is a key part of any research agenda into games. When we place humans into large scale MMOGs or into single player modules, the question becomes what happened during game play, and what was the impact on the player? Current serious game usage and large scale simulation requires human monitors to watch networked play. At the end of the day, the human monitor comes back and says .I believe this team won and here is why.. We need an automated understanding and analysis capability of MMOG play such that we get a high level report of what happened during game play over a specified period of time, from a particular viewpoint, with the option to be able to query that system for additional detailed information as to why it reported so. There are defense, homeland security, and educational applications that require such automated analyses if we are to grow gaming much into the serious game domain. In addition, the entertainment world perhaps needs to analyze player behavior to better market to and entertain.

 

Pedagogy/story integration is how we determine theories and develop practices for inserting pedagogy into story, such that the story is still immersive and entertaining, with pedagogy remaining subordinate to story. The game industry has the failure of Edutainment, where educational software was sprinkled lightly with game-like interfaces and cuteness. What we are stating, is that the story must come first and we must research how we can insert pedagogy into the story creation and development process in the interactive medium of games.