Social Simulation Game: Prom Week

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MCP
Posts: 518
Joined: May 23rd, 2005, 5:23 pm
Location: California

Social Simulation Game: Prom Week

Post by MCP »

Hi all,
I was at the UC Santa Cruz engineering research day last week and I was introduced to the "Prom Week," a video game based on research project in social simulation.
Video Available and Game TBD: http://games.soe.ucsc.edu/project/prom-week
Prom Week is an in-development social simulation game about the dramatic week leading up to a high school prom. It attempts to achieve rich character specificity while maintaining a highly dynamic story space. Prom Week, which is planned for release on Facebook, is an experiment in AI-based design, which involves creating new artificial intelligence techniques to tackle difficult game design problems.
To give an example, they read stuff from 1970s psychology about social interactions along with mathematical representations. The research kind of stagnated in many ways and they wanted to revive it. They used the social representations to analyze Sex and the City. They'd pause it every 30 seconds or so and categorize what just happened within their state machine design. Eventually coming up with some idea of how Sex and the City works, the idea is you could write an AI to script social situations for an episode of Sex and the City, although it wouldn't quite have the big picture all the time.

I went to school with Mike Treanor, so I was interested on a personal level. But this is step two in their research.
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