Designing Semantic Game Worlds

Abstract

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.