Cited By
View all- Costa Kohwalter TGresta Paulino Murta LWalter Gonzalez Clua E(2025)Prov-DIFF: Play traces analysis through provenance differencesEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10077752(100777)Online publication date: Jan-2025
Game Mechanic Alignment Theory
Authors: 
Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Rodrigo Canaan, Philip Bontrager, 
Julian TogeliusAuthors Info & Claims
Article No.: 29, Pages 1 - 11
Abstract
We present a new concept called Game Mechanic Alignment theory as a way to organize game mechanics through the lens of systemic rewards and agential motivations. By disentangling player and systemic influences, mechanics may be better identified for use in an automated tutorial generation system, which could tailor tutorials for a particular playstyle or player. Within, we apply this theory to several well-known games to demonstrate how designers can benefit from it, we describe a methodology for how to estimate “mechanic alignment”, and we apply this methodology on multiple games in the GVGAI framework. We discuss how effectively this estimation captures agential motivations and systemic rewards and how our theory could be used as an alternative way to find mechanics for tutorial generation.
References
[1]
Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings. 2007. Game design and development: Fundamentals of game design. New Jersey: Pearse Prentice Hall(2007).
[2]
Ryan Alexander and Chris Martens. 2017. Deriving quests from open world mechanics. In Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 12.
[3]
Damien Anderson, Matthew Stephenson, Julian Togelius, Christoph Salge, John Levine, and Jochen Renz. 2018. Deceptive games. In International Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation. Springer, 376–391.
[4]
Batu Aytemiz, Isaac Karth, Jesse Harder, Adam Smith, and Jim Whitehead. 2018. Talin: A Framework for Dynamic Tutorials Based on the Skill Atoms Theory. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Vol. 14.
[5]
Richard A Bartle. 2004. Designing virtual worlds. New Riders.
[6]
Kelly Bergstrom, Marcus Carter, Darryl Woodford, and Chris Paul. 2013. Constructing the ideal EVE online player. Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies. (2013).
[7]
Mateusz Bialas, Shoshannah Tekofsky, and Pieter Spronck. 2014. Cultural influences on play style. In 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE, 1–7.
[8]
Philip Bontrager, Ahmed Khalifa, Andre Mendes, and Julian Togelius. 2016. Matching games and algorithms for general video game playing. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Vol. 12.
[9]
Cameron B Browne, Edward Powley, Daniel Whitehouse, Simon M Lucas, Peter I Cowling, Philipp Rohlfshagen, Stephen Tavener, Diego Perez, Spyridon Samothrakis, and Simon Colton. 2012. A survey of monte carlo tree search methods. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in games 4, 1(2012), 1–43.
[10]
Megan Charity, Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, and Julian Togelius. 2020. Mech-Elites: Illuminating the Mechanic Space of GVG-AI. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–10.
[11]
Michael Cook, Simon Colton, Azalea Raad, and Jeremy Gow. 2013. Mechanic miner: Reflection-driven game mechanic discovery and level design. In European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary Computation. Springer, 284–293.
[12]
Fernando de Mesentier Silva, Aaron Isaksen, Julian Togelius, and Andy Nealen. 2016. Generating heuristics for novice players. In Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE, 1–8.
[13]
Fernando de Mesentier Silva, Julian Togelius, Frank Lantz, and Andy Nealen. 2018. Generating Beginner Heuristics for Simple Texas Hold’em. In Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. ACM.
[14]
Fernando de Mesentier Silva, Julian Togelius, Frank Lantz, and Andy Nealen. 2018. Generating Novice Heuristics for Post-Flop Poker. In Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE.
[15]
Sam Devlin, Anastasija Anspoka, Nick Sephton, Peter I Cowling, and Jeff Rollason. 2016. Combining Gameplay Data With Monte Carlo Tree Search To Emulate Human Play. In Proceedings of the AAAI Artificial Intelligence for Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. AAAI.
[16]
Joris Dormans. 2011. Simulating mechanics to study emergence in games. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Vol. 7.
[17]
Ahmet Ekin, A Murat Tekalp, and Rajiv Mehrotra. 2003. Automatic soccer video analysis and summarization. IEEE Transactions on Image processing 12, 7 (2003).
[18]
George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield, and K Robert Gutschera. 2012. Characteristics of games. MIT Press.
[19]
Raluca D Gaina, Diego Pérez-Liébana, and Simon M Lucas. 2016. General video game for 2 players: Framework and competition. In Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. IEEE, 186–191.
[20]
Euro Gamer. 2015. Miyamoto on World 1-1: How Nintendo made Mario’s most iconic level. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRGRJRUWafY. Last Accessed: February 1, 2021.
[21]
Michael Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Gabriella Barros, and Julian Togellius. 2017. ” Press Space to Fire”: Automatic Video Game Tutorial Generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Vol. 13. AAAI.
[22]
Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Gabriella AB Barros, Tiago Machado, Andy Nealen, and Julian Togelius. 2018. AtDELFI: automatically designing legible, full instructions for games. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 1–10.
[23]
Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Gabriella AB Barros, Tiago Machado, and Julian Togelius. 2020. Automatic Critical Mechanic Discovery Using Playtraces in Video Games. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 1–9.
[24]
Michael Cerny Green, Ahmed Khalifa, Gabriella AB Barros, Andy Nealen, and Julian Togelius. 2018. Generating levels that teach mechanics. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–8.
[25]
Michael Cerny Green, Luvneesh Mugrai, Ahmed Khalifa, and Julian Togelius. 2020. Mario level generation from mechanics using scene stitching. In 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE, 49–56.
[26]
Christoffer Holmgård, Michael Cerny Green, Antonios Liapis, and Julian Togelius. 2018. Automated playtesting with procedural personas through MCTS with evolved heuristics. (2018).
[27]
Christoffer Holmgård, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius, and Georgios N. Yannakakis. 2014. Evolving Personas for Player Decision Modeling. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE.
[28]
Christoffer Holmgård, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius, and Georgios N Yannakakis. 2014. Personas versus clones for player decision modeling. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Entertainment Computing. Springer, 159–166.
[29]
Christoffer Holmgård, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius, and Georgios N. Yannakakis. 2015. Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Persona Based Player Modeling. In Proceedings of the AIIDE workshop on Player Modeling.
[30]
Britton Horn, Amy K Hoover, Yetunde Folajimi, Jackie Barnes, Casper Harteveld, and Gillian Smith. 2017. AI-assisted analysis of player strategy across level progressions in a puzzle game. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 1–10.
[31]
Aki Järvinen. 2008. Games without frontiers: Theories and methods for game studies and design. Tampere University Press.
[32]
Ahmed Khalifa, Fernando de Mesentier Silva, and Julian Togelius. 2019. Level Design Patterns in 2D Games. In 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE, 1–8.
[33]
Ahmed Khalifa, Michael Cerny Green, Gabriella Barros, and Julian Togelius. 2019. Intentional computational level design. In Proceedings of The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. 796–803.
[34]
Ahmed Khalifa, Michael Cerny Green, Diego Perez-Liebana, and Julian Togelius. 2017. General video game rule generation. In 2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG). IEEE, 170–177.
[35]
Ahmed Khalifa, Aaron Isaksen, Julian Togelius, and Andy Nealen. 2016. Modifying mcts for human-like general video game playing. In Proceedings of IJCAI.
[36]
Ahmed Khalifa, Diego Perez-Liebana, Simon M Lucas, and Julian Togelius. 2016. General video game level generation. In Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. ACM, 253–259.
[37]
D Michael Kuhlman and Alfred F Marshello. 1975. Individual differences in game motivation as moderators of preprogrammed strategy effects in prisoner’s dilemma.Journal of personality and social psychology 32, 5(1975), 922.
[38]
Mark Nelson. 2016. Investigating vanilla MCTS scaling on the GVG-AI game corpus. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE.
[39]
Juan Ortega, Noor Shaker, Julian Togelius, and Georgios N Yannakakis. 2013. Imitating Human Playing Styles in Super Mario Bros. Entertainment Computing 4, 2 (2013), 93–104.
[40]
Joseph Osborn, Adam Summerville, and Michael Mateas. 2017. Automatic mapping of NES games with mappy. In Foundations of Digital Games. ACM, 78.
[41]
Diego Perez-Liebana, Jialin Liu, Ahmed Khalifa, Raluca D Gaina, Julian Togelius, and Simon M Lucas. 2019. General video game ai: a multi-track framework for evaluating agents, games and content generation algorithms. Transactions on Games(2019).
[42]
Diego Perez-Liebana, Spyridon Samothrakis, Julian Togelius, Tom Schaul, and Simon M Lucas. 2016. General video game ai: Competition, challenges and opportunities. In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
[43]
Diego Perez-Liebana, Spyridon Samothrakis, Julian Togelius, Tom Schaul, Simon M Lucas, Adrien Couëtoux, Jerry Lee, Chong-U Lim, and Tommy Thompson. 2015. The 2014 general video game playing competition. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 8, 3(2015), 229–243.
[44]
Sheri Graner Ray. 2010. Tutorials: learning to play. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134531/tutorials_learning_to_play.php?print=1.
[45]
Wannes Ribbens and Yorick Poels. 2009. Researching player experiences through the use of different qualitative methods. In DiGRA Conference.
[46]
Katie Salen, Katie Salen Tekinbaş, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT press.
[47]
Miguel Sicart. 2008. Defining game mechanics. Game Studies 8, 2 (2008), n.
[48]
Adam Summerville, Chris Martens, Sarah Harmon, Michael Mateas, Joseph Carter Osborn, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Arnav Jhala. 2017. From Mechanics to Meaning. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.
[49]
Richard S Sutton and Andrew G Barto. 2018. Reinforcement learning: An introduction. MIT press.
[50]
S. Tekofsky, P. Spronck, A. Plaat, J. van den Herik, and J. Broersen. 2013. Play style: Showing your age. In 2013 IEEE Conference on Computational Inteligence in Games (CIG). IEEE, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2013.6633616
[51]
Carl Therrien. 2011. ” To Get Help, Please Press X” The Rise of the Assistance Paradigm in Video Game Design. In DiGRA Conference.
[52]
Julian Togelius, Renzo De Nardi, and Simon M Lucas. 2007. Towards Automatic Personalised Content Creation for Racing Games. In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE.
[53]
Ruben Rodriguez Torrado, Philip Bontrager, Julian Togelius, Jialin Liu, and Diego Perez-Liebana. 2018. Deep Reinforcement Learning for General Video Game AI. In Computational Intelligence and Games. IEEE, 1–8.
[54]
Leonid Wasserstein. 1969. Markov processes with countable state space describing large systems of automata. IEEE Transactions on Image processing 5, 3 (1969). in Russian.
[55]
Georgios N. Yannakakis, Pieter Spronck, Daniele Loiacono, and Elisabeth André. 2013. Player Modeling. In Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games. Dagstuhl Publishing, Saarbrücken/Wadern, 45–55.
[56]
Nicholas Yee. 2002. Facets: 5 motivation factors for why people play MMORPG’s. Terra Incognita 1(2002), 1708–1723.
[57]
Alexander Zook, Brent Harrison, and Mark O Riedl. 2015. Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Simulation-based Strategy Analysis. In Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. ACM.
- Game Mechanic Alignment Theory
Recommendations
AtDELFI: automatically designing legible, full instructions for games
FDG '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital GamesThis paper introduces a fully automatic method for generating video game tutorials. The AtDELFI system (Automatically DEsigning Legible, Full Instructions for games) was created to investigate procedural generation of instructions that teach players how ...
Players as Coresearchers: Expert Player Perspective as an Aid to Understanding Games
This article argues for the use of expert players as coresearchers when studying game systems and game design choices. As emergent systems that may react differently to different playstyles, games need to be studied from a variety of gameplay ...
A game-based corpus for analysing the interplay between game context and player experience
ACII'11: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Affective computing and intelligent interaction - Volume Part IIRecognizing players' affective state while playing video games has been the focus of many recent research studies. In this paper we describe the process that has been followed to build a corpus based on game events and recorded video sessions from human ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
August 2021
534 pages
ISBN:9781450384223
DOI:10.1145/3472538
Copyright © 2021 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 21 October 2021
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Conference
FDG'21
FDG'21: The 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2021
August 3 - 6, 2021
QC, Montreal, Canada
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- View Citations1Total Citations
- 173Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)39
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)4
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View all- Costa Kohwalter TGresta Paulino Murta LWalter Gonzalez Clua E(2025)Prov-DIFF: Play traces analysis through provenance differencesEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10077752(100777)Online publication date: Jan-2025
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format