SIGGRAPH

Pitch was an attempt by students and interns at Carnegie-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center [ETC] graduate program to create a casual social card game for the Sandbox Symposium. The Sandbox Symposium, a gathering focused on games and the gaming ...

The panel will explore the current state of the game industry and how best to innovate and stay fresh in an ever-changing marketplace. The implied value of innovation will be questioned along with the economic means to support it. That is to say, can we ...

Since the beginning, computer games have drawn on existing Intellectual Property from other media including books, television, movies. Adventure/Colossal Cave and it's earliest commercial descendent, Infocom's Zork drew indirectly from the works of ...

Historically, media literacy efforts have been couched in terms of helping a younger generation of students learn to "see through" media messages emanating from corporate-produced media that are designed to produce hegemonic discourse. Today's emerging ...

Research into improving the accessibility of computer games can enable us to better understand what makes a good gaming experience for all users. We discuss work carried out in developing AudioQuake (an adaption of Quake for blind gamers); specifically ...

Not much has changed in two years. A large portion of the video game industry honestly believes that poor quality of life is a requirement for the business. They have publicly argued that game developers are "passionate" people; that "passion" can only ...

Rasterization hardware and computer games have always been tightly connected: The hardware implementation of rasterization has made complex interactive 3D games possible while requirements for future games drive the development of increasingly parallel ...

This paper describes the application of a methodology for game genre and player experience innovation called "play-centric design." This method is shown in context as the primary design methodology for an experimental play project, Cloud, created by ...

Dynamo (DYNAmic MOtion capture) is an approach to controlling animated characters in a dynamic virtual world. Leveraging existing methods, characters are simultaneously physically simulated and driven to perform kinematic motion (from mocap or other ...

Interactive entertainment has long been one of the driving factors behind architectural innovation, pushing the boundaries of computing to achieve ever more realistic virtual experiences. Future entertainment applications will feature robust physics ...

We describe two approaches to aid in game design, evaluation and development for user-players staying there, continuing to engage in game activities. The first is the hierarchical activity-based scenario (HABS) approach providing a theoretical framework ...

Computer role-playing games can provide a suitable vehicle for the teaching of certain subjects in a manner which can be engaging and immersive to students. In this paper, we describe our experiences developing such a game in a game design course at the ...

In this paper we address the value and importance of using humour in videogames. We show how humour can facilitate character interaction, support gameplay, and augment players' intrinsic involvement. We outline humour theories: superiority, incongruity ...

The paper explores the mutually-constituted relations between avatars, space, and artifacts depicted in players' profile portraits in a Second Life BDSM community. The significance of these images is not simply their representation of the lifestyle; ...

In this paper, we present refinements to dual paraboloid shadow mapping algorithm from Brabec, et. al. This work makes the algorithm practical for broader use in video games. We give solutions for the tessellation constraints on shadow casters and ...

Computer Gaming has some unique modeling needs not anticipated with the traditional modeling techniques that evolved in CAD/CAM or animation. Real-time display, economical data base, novice user interaction, collaborative design, cost effective ...

Crowds and other flock-like group motion are often modeled as interacting particle systems. These multi-agent simulations are computationally expensive because each agent must consider all of the others, if only to identify its neighbors. For large ...

This paper discusses two computer graphics-intensive projects at the University of Southern California that are being developed with funding from the U.S. military: Tactical Iraqi, a computer game designed to accelerate a soldier's acquisition of spoken ...

In this paper, I discuss a way to teach game design in the undergraduate literature classroom by having students transform literary narratives into interpretative quests. This argument contributes to a recent theoretical and practical discussion of ...

The study of computer games and their influence in culture has become an important issue in many disciplines. In this paper we will analyze how computer games change our understanding of reading literacy in a pedagogical context. Based on Aarseth's ...

We propose a method to extract the emotional data from a piece of music and then use that data via a remapping algorithm to automatically animate an emotional 3D face sequence. The method is based on studies of the emotional aspect of music and our ...

We describe real time dynamic wind calculation for a pressure driven wind system. This simple and elegant approach allows us to perform visual effects in real time using a minute fraction of the CPU's processing power over and above what is required for ...

Competitive fighting games, where players choose a rapid sequence of actions designed to trump an opponent's simultaneous actions, are more complex, real-time adaptations of the well-known game Rock, Paper, Scissors. We present an analysis of Rock, ...

Mobile phones are often carried in the pocket making them available for gaming any time. Mobile games typically rely on the joystick for input, but quality of the joystick is very different in the different devices. This paper presents Ancient Runes, a ...

The idea of end-user game authoring environments is quickly gaining momentum in education. Environments such as AgentSheets have been used by thousands of children to learn about programming and design by creating their own computer games. With only ...

A novel approach to generate virtual building interiors in real-time is presented. The interiors are generated in a top-down fashion using architectural guidelines. Although a building interior in its entirety may be quite large, only the portions that ...