Rafael Bidarra | Delft University of Technology (original) (raw)

Papers by Rafael Bidarra

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, bu... more Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, but still have not reached their full potential, despite the large consensus they have gained recently. The entertainment game industry is a rapidly developing phenomenon, with a high market potential, enabled and enhanced by technological innovation. The question examined in this paper is: Did serious game designers learn from Entertainment Game (EG) designers in building a successful game? This paper presents three case study examples of games that have good learning outcomes to explore this question. This paper discusses the salient aspects and the differences between the examples and suggests how SGs could learn more from successful EGs.

Foundations of Digital Games, 2014

Implementation of a narrative world is often laborious and remains fairly independent from workin... more Implementation of a narrative world is often laborious and remains fairly independent from working directly with the narrative itself. Currently, there are few tools able to simplify this process. The aim of our research is to support this process by developing a declarative approach for generating
narrative worlds. A set of narrative semantics will be used to discover and further generate appropriate content. The declarative approach and semantics will be initially implemented and validated in a virtual therapy tool for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. The project will evolve towards the creation of a more general narrative creation tool.

Games for Health, 2013

Virtual reality (VR) techniques have proved effective in distracting patients from perceived pain... more Virtual reality (VR) techniques have proved effective in distracting patients from perceived pain in a variety of studies. These results, partly due to the visual impact and immersion achieved, encourage investigating the purposeful design of games for deployment in a variety of dentist treatments. In fact, a large group of patients, particularly youngsters, experience a strong resistance or even aversion to visiting a dentist's practice, often due to previous distressing and painful experiences. We argue that, to solve such situations, distracting a patient with just an attractive virtual environment is less efficient than with an interactive game expressly designed for this context and purpose. This paper presents the first results of a pilot project in this direction. We discuss the various requirements gathered throughout the project, and describe several technological challenges, involving e.g. user experience, interaction, content, graphics, which we faced throughout the game design and development phases. Although the project is still ongoing, the preliminary results of the prototype game evaluation in a controlled environment were very encouraging.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

International Journal of Computer Games Technology 2009, Apr 1, 2009

Serious games are being more and more deployed in such diverse areas as public awareness, militar... more Serious games are being more and more deployed in such diverse areas as public awareness, military training, and higher education. One of the driving forces behind this stems from the rapidly growing availability of game technologies, providing not only better, faster, and more realistic graphics, physics, and animations, but above all making "the language" of game development accessible to increasingly more people. The articles in this special issue are a rich sampling of how game technology can be creatively put to service within games for training and education purposes.

Proceedings of the First Acm Sigchi Annual Symposium, Oct 19, 2014

International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2009

Internet Learning, 2013

Abstract: Serious games have emerged as a new medium that enable players to acquire and enhance t... more Abstract: Serious games have emerged as a new medium that enable players to acquire and enhance their skills and knowledge particularly in education and increasingly across a spectrum of fields from industrial and emergency training to marketing. While the use of serious games has extended rapidly to a variety of domains, their design and development remains a challenging process both for developers and teachers/trainers. This paper approaches the technological environment underpinning the development of serious ...

International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2015

ABSTRACT

Proceedings of the The third workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCG'12, 2012

The use of procedural content generation to support adaptive games is starting to gain momentum i... more The use of procedural content generation to support adaptive games is starting to gain momentum in current research. However, there are still many open issues to tackle, namely the reusability of methodologies. Our research focuses on reusable and generic methods for linking the procedural generation of 3D game worlds with gameplay, as measured by player modelling techniques. As the interface for that link, we propose the use of gameplay semantics, a knowledge representation technique that allows our case-based generator to match content to player models. We present and discuss the implementation of our proposed method in an existing game, Stunt Playground. Gameplay semantics is created by designers in a generic way and is then used to procedurally generate player-matching Stunt Playground game worlds, both at the design and game stage. Current results show that our approach can automatically create such adaptive game content, thus effectively bridging game world designers, procedural generation and gameplay.

Proceedings of the The third workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCG'12, 2012

Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation o... more Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation of the world and the way it feels, behaves, and reacts. This problem partly originates from the goaloriented and cost-effective nature of the game development process, which mostly favors ad hoc solutions for one particular game, rather than investing in concepts like reusability and emergent gameplay. In broader terms, we observe that game worlds miss semantics, and we argue that its deployment has the potential to bring about the consistency missing in their content. Therefore, we present a novel approach aimed at enriching virtual entities in game worlds with information about their roles, how they relate to others, and how they can affect and interact with players, NPCs, and with each other. We discuss several requirements to achieve these goals, and introduce a semantic model to represent game worlds. In order to support and validate this model, we have developed Entika, a framework to facilitate the deployment of semantics during game development, as well as its maintenance during run-time. Furthermore, we briefly discuss several applications that demonstrate the power of this semantic model for game worlds. After careful evaluation of our semantic game world model and framework, we conclude that a semantically rich world representation can substantially assist designers in creating much more consistent game worlds.

Beiträge zur Graphischen Datenverarbeitung, 1993

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCGames '11, 2011

Designing virtual game worlds is often a long and laborintensive process. Moreover, when a game w... more Designing virtual game worlds is often a long and laborintensive process. Moreover, when a game world needs to be slightly altered in appearance, the entire process needs to be repeated, or will at least require some repetitious tasks. Ideally, when the same game world is needed under different circumstances (e.g. in another season, before and after a war, in prosperous or poor economic conditions), the designer should be aided in this process using procedural generation techniques.

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Tools and Methods for Concurrent Engineering, 1996

Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players w... more Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players with ever growing cities and terrains to explore. However most sandbox-style games situated in cities, do not allow players to wander into buildings. In past research, space planning techniques have already been utilized to generate suitable layouts for both building floor plans and room layouts. We introduce

The use of procedural content generation (PCG) techniques in game development has been mostly res... more The use of procedural content generation (PCG) techniques in game development has been mostly restricted to very specific types of game elements. PCG has been seldom deployed for generating entire game levels, a notable exception to this being dungeons, a specific type of game levels often encountered in adventure and role playing games. Due to their peculiar combination of pace, gameplay and game spaces, dungeon levels are among the most suited to showcase the benefits of PCG. This article surveys research on procedural methods to generate dungeon game levels. We summarize common practices, discuss pros and cons of different approaches, and identify a few promising challenges ahead. In general, what current procedural dungeon generation methods are missing is not performance, but more powerful, accurate and richer control over the generation process. Recent research results seem to indicate that gameplayrelated criteria can provide such high-level control. However, this area is still in its infancy, and many research challenges are still lying ahead, e.g. improving the intuitiveness and accessibility of such methods for designers. We also observe that more research is needed into generic mechanisms for automating the generation of the actual dungeon geometric models. We conclude that the foundations for enabling gameplay-based control of dungeon-level generation are worth being researched, and that its promising results may be instrumental in bringing PCG into mainstream game development.

Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to increasingly realistic agent and group... more Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to increasingly realistic agent and group behavior. As many crowd simulation solutions typically target only specific types of environments and scenarios, numerous special-purpose methods and systems have emerged that are unsuitable for other contexts. Solving this situation demands a higher-level approach that takes re-use and re-configuration of crowds as a priority, for adequate application in a broad variety of scenarios, virtual environments and interaction with the entities present in that environment. In this article, we propose semantic crowds, a novel approach that allows one to specify and re-use the same crowds for virtually any environment, and have them use the objects available in it in a meaningful manner. To have the agents autonomously interact within any virtual world, we avoid in them explicit object-related information. Instead, this knowledge is stored in the objects themselves, which can then be queried, according to an agent's needs. To facilitate creating such crowds, we developed an interactive crowd editor that provides high-level editing parameters for defining crowd templates. We illustrate the flexibility of semantic crowds by means of three cases, in which we let the same crowd populate quite differently configured airport terminal environments. These examples also highlight that this modular approach easily combines with your custom implementations of agent behavior model and/or motion planner.

Procedural modeling deals with (semi-)automatic content generation by means of a program or proce... more Procedural modeling deals with (semi-)automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modeling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games, and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings, and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non-technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modeling. PM has the potential to drastically reduce the amount of modeling effort required to create digital content. Furthermore, because its methods are often stochastic, PM can create a variety of results from one set of input parameters; e.g., a large number of tree models, all of the same species and age, but each with a unique structure and shape.

One of the most powerful characteristics of feature-based modeling is the ability to associate fu... more One of the most powerful characteristics of feature-based modeling is the ability to associate functional and engineering information to shape information in a product model. Current feature modeling systems embody this paradigm in their graphical user interfaces, providing the user with "engineering rich" dialogs aimed at the creation of feature instances. Most systems, however, fail to consistently maintain the meaning of the features throughout the modeling process. For example, a modeling operation on one feature may affect the semantics of other features without the user being notified by the system, let alone assisted in overcoming the situation.

Abstract Manual game content creation is an increasingly laborious task; with each advance in gra... more Abstract Manual game content creation is an increasingly laborious task; with each advance in graphics hardware, a higher level of fidelity and detail is achievable and, therefore, expected. Although numerous automatic (eg procedural) content generation algorithms and techniques have been developed over the years, their application in both games and simulations is not widespread. What lacks is a unifying modeling framework that combines these techniques in a usable manner.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014

Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, bu... more Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, but still have not reached their full potential, despite the large consensus they have gained recently. The entertainment game industry is a rapidly developing phenomenon, with a high market potential, enabled and enhanced by technological innovation. The question examined in this paper is: Did serious game designers learn from Entertainment Game (EG) designers in building a successful game? This paper presents three case study examples of games that have good learning outcomes to explore this question. This paper discusses the salient aspects and the differences between the examples and suggests how SGs could learn more from successful EGs.

Foundations of Digital Games, 2014

Implementation of a narrative world is often laborious and remains fairly independent from workin... more Implementation of a narrative world is often laborious and remains fairly independent from working directly with the narrative itself. Currently, there are few tools able to simplify this process. The aim of our research is to support this process by developing a declarative approach for generating
narrative worlds. A set of narrative semantics will be used to discover and further generate appropriate content. The declarative approach and semantics will be initially implemented and validated in a virtual therapy tool for patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. The project will evolve towards the creation of a more general narrative creation tool.

Games for Health, 2013

Virtual reality (VR) techniques have proved effective in distracting patients from perceived pain... more Virtual reality (VR) techniques have proved effective in distracting patients from perceived pain in a variety of studies. These results, partly due to the visual impact and immersion achieved, encourage investigating the purposeful design of games for deployment in a variety of dentist treatments. In fact, a large group of patients, particularly youngsters, experience a strong resistance or even aversion to visiting a dentist's practice, often due to previous distressing and painful experiences. We argue that, to solve such situations, distracting a patient with just an attractive virtual environment is less efficient than with an interactive game expressly designed for this context and purpose. This paper presents the first results of a pilot project in this direction. We discuss the various requirements gathered throughout the project, and describe several technological challenges, involving e.g. user experience, interaction, content, graphics, which we faced throughout the game design and development phases. Although the project is still ongoing, the preliminary results of the prototype game evaluation in a controlled environment were very encouraging.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

International Journal of Computer Games Technology 2009, Apr 1, 2009

Serious games are being more and more deployed in such diverse areas as public awareness, militar... more Serious games are being more and more deployed in such diverse areas as public awareness, military training, and higher education. One of the driving forces behind this stems from the rapidly growing availability of game technologies, providing not only better, faster, and more realistic graphics, physics, and animations, but above all making "the language" of game development accessible to increasingly more people. The articles in this special issue are a rich sampling of how game technology can be creatively put to service within games for training and education purposes.

Proceedings of the First Acm Sigchi Annual Symposium, Oct 19, 2014

International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2009

Internet Learning, 2013

Abstract: Serious games have emerged as a new medium that enable players to acquire and enhance t... more Abstract: Serious games have emerged as a new medium that enable players to acquire and enhance their skills and knowledge particularly in education and increasingly across a spectrum of fields from industrial and emergency training to marketing. While the use of serious games has extended rapidly to a variety of domains, their design and development remains a challenging process both for developers and teachers/trainers. This paper approaches the technological environment underpinning the development of serious ...

International Journal of Computer Games Technology, 2015

ABSTRACT

Proceedings of the The third workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCG'12, 2012

The use of procedural content generation to support adaptive games is starting to gain momentum i... more The use of procedural content generation to support adaptive games is starting to gain momentum in current research. However, there are still many open issues to tackle, namely the reusability of methodologies. Our research focuses on reusable and generic methods for linking the procedural generation of 3D game worlds with gameplay, as measured by player modelling techniques. As the interface for that link, we propose the use of gameplay semantics, a knowledge representation technique that allows our case-based generator to match content to player models. We present and discuss the implementation of our proposed method in an existing game, Stunt Playground. Gameplay semantics is created by designers in a generic way and is then used to procedurally generate player-matching Stunt Playground game worlds, both at the design and game stage. Current results show that our approach can automatically create such adaptive game content, thus effectively bridging game world designers, procedural generation and gameplay.

Proceedings of the The third workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCG'12, 2012

Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation o... more Current game worlds often fall short in providing consistency between the visual representation of the world and the way it feels, behaves, and reacts. This problem partly originates from the goaloriented and cost-effective nature of the game development process, which mostly favors ad hoc solutions for one particular game, rather than investing in concepts like reusability and emergent gameplay. In broader terms, we observe that game worlds miss semantics, and we argue that its deployment has the potential to bring about the consistency missing in their content. Therefore, we present a novel approach aimed at enriching virtual entities in game worlds with information about their roles, how they relate to others, and how they can affect and interact with players, NPCs, and with each other. We discuss several requirements to achieve these goals, and introduce a semantic model to represent game worlds. In order to support and validate this model, we have developed Entika, a framework to facilitate the deployment of semantics during game development, as well as its maintenance during run-time. Furthermore, we briefly discuss several applications that demonstrate the power of this semantic model for game worlds. After careful evaluation of our semantic game world model and framework, we conclude that a semantically rich world representation can substantially assist designers in creating much more consistent game worlds.

Beiträge zur Graphischen Datenverarbeitung, 1993

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games - PCGames '11, 2011

Designing virtual game worlds is often a long and laborintensive process. Moreover, when a game w... more Designing virtual game worlds is often a long and laborintensive process. Moreover, when a game world needs to be slightly altered in appearance, the entire process needs to be repeated, or will at least require some repetitious tasks. Ideally, when the same game world is needed under different circumstances (e.g. in another season, before and after a war, in prosperous or poor economic conditions), the designer should be aided in this process using procedural generation techniques.

Proceedings of the International Symposium on Tools and Methods for Concurrent Engineering, 1996

Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players w... more Due to the recent advancement in procedural generation techniques, games are presenting players with ever growing cities and terrains to explore. However most sandbox-style games situated in cities, do not allow players to wander into buildings. In past research, space planning techniques have already been utilized to generate suitable layouts for both building floor plans and room layouts. We introduce

The use of procedural content generation (PCG) techniques in game development has been mostly res... more The use of procedural content generation (PCG) techniques in game development has been mostly restricted to very specific types of game elements. PCG has been seldom deployed for generating entire game levels, a notable exception to this being dungeons, a specific type of game levels often encountered in adventure and role playing games. Due to their peculiar combination of pace, gameplay and game spaces, dungeon levels are among the most suited to showcase the benefits of PCG. This article surveys research on procedural methods to generate dungeon game levels. We summarize common practices, discuss pros and cons of different approaches, and identify a few promising challenges ahead. In general, what current procedural dungeon generation methods are missing is not performance, but more powerful, accurate and richer control over the generation process. Recent research results seem to indicate that gameplayrelated criteria can provide such high-level control. However, this area is still in its infancy, and many research challenges are still lying ahead, e.g. improving the intuitiveness and accessibility of such methods for designers. We also observe that more research is needed into generic mechanisms for automating the generation of the actual dungeon geometric models. We conclude that the foundations for enabling gameplay-based control of dungeon-level generation are worth being researched, and that its promising results may be instrumental in bringing PCG into mainstream game development.

Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to increasingly realistic agent and group... more Recent advances in crowd simulation techniques have led to increasingly realistic agent and group behavior. As many crowd simulation solutions typically target only specific types of environments and scenarios, numerous special-purpose methods and systems have emerged that are unsuitable for other contexts. Solving this situation demands a higher-level approach that takes re-use and re-configuration of crowds as a priority, for adequate application in a broad variety of scenarios, virtual environments and interaction with the entities present in that environment. In this article, we propose semantic crowds, a novel approach that allows one to specify and re-use the same crowds for virtually any environment, and have them use the objects available in it in a meaningful manner. To have the agents autonomously interact within any virtual world, we avoid in them explicit object-related information. Instead, this knowledge is stored in the objects themselves, which can then be queried, according to an agent's needs. To facilitate creating such crowds, we developed an interactive crowd editor that provides high-level editing parameters for defining crowd templates. We illustrate the flexibility of semantic crowds by means of three cases, in which we let the same crowd populate quite differently configured airport terminal environments. These examples also highlight that this modular approach easily combines with your custom implementations of agent behavior model and/or motion planner.

Procedural modeling deals with (semi-)automatic content generation by means of a program or proce... more Procedural modeling deals with (semi-)automatic content generation by means of a program or procedure. Among other advantages, its data compression and the potential to generate a large variety of detailed content with reduced human intervention, have made procedural modeling attractive for creating virtual environments increasingly used in movies, games, and simulations. We survey procedural methods that are useful to generate features of virtual worlds, including terrains, vegetation, rivers, roads, buildings, and entire cities. In this survey, we focus particularly on the degree of intuitive control and of interactivity offered by each procedural method, because these properties are instrumental for their typical users: designers and artists. We identify the most promising research results that have been recently achieved, but we also realize that there is far from widespread acceptance of procedural methods among non-technical, creative professionals. We conclude by discussing some of the most important challenges of procedural modeling. PM has the potential to drastically reduce the amount of modeling effort required to create digital content. Furthermore, because its methods are often stochastic, PM can create a variety of results from one set of input parameters; e.g., a large number of tree models, all of the same species and age, but each with a unique structure and shape.

One of the most powerful characteristics of feature-based modeling is the ability to associate fu... more One of the most powerful characteristics of feature-based modeling is the ability to associate functional and engineering information to shape information in a product model. Current feature modeling systems embody this paradigm in their graphical user interfaces, providing the user with "engineering rich" dialogs aimed at the creation of feature instances. Most systems, however, fail to consistently maintain the meaning of the features throughout the modeling process. For example, a modeling operation on one feature may affect the semantics of other features without the user being notified by the system, let alone assisted in overcoming the situation.

Abstract Manual game content creation is an increasingly laborious task; with each advance in gra... more Abstract Manual game content creation is an increasingly laborious task; with each advance in graphics hardware, a higher level of fidelity and detail is achievable and, therefore, expected. Although numerous automatic (eg procedural) content generation algorithms and techniques have been developed over the years, their application in both games and simulations is not widespread. What lacks is a unifying modeling framework that combines these techniques in a usable manner.