Home About EIS →

Author Archives: Ben Weber

StarCraft AI Competition Submission

By Ben Weber | Published: August 28, 2010

Submission for the StarCraft AI Competition is now open. Complete details are provided at the submission site.

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

EISBot in New Scientist

By Ben Weber | Published: August 18, 2010

New Scientist is running an article about the use of data mining in computer games. The article focuses on research being presented at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010). Catch live coverage of the conference here. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727745.100-online-games-are-a-gold-mine-for-design-ideas.htm

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

Space Cow Clicker

By Ben Weber | Published: July 24, 2010

In space, social interactions are sparse. Space Cow Clicker overcomes this problem. In this parody of a satire, you command a battlecruiser (Space Cow) in an epic battle  to click enemy units. The first player to click all of the opponent forces wins: To click is natural, to command is Bovine!

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

Rise of the Beta

By Ben Weber | Published: June 17, 2010

My dissertation work aims to build intelligent game AI by learning from replays. However, the major limitation of this approach is that the AI cannot be developed until a large number of players have first played the game. Fortunately, large-scale beta testing is becoming more popular for games. These beta cycles result in mountains of data that can be used to build AI for games. One of the most notorious beta releases is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft 2, which ran from February 17 to June 7. The only AI provided with this release was “very easy”, which means that Blizzard may be analyzing how players actually play the game before finalizing the AI.

Posted in Games | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Interactive Drama and Action: Can we have it all?

By Ben Weber | Published: June 10, 2010

‘Kasumi’s Stolen Memory’ is a DLC mission for Mass Effect 2 that adds a new perspective to gameplay in the Mass Effect series. While the DLC contains the formulaic loyalty mission for the new character, it also puts Commander Shepard in a new role in which the player interacts in a formal social setting. Shepard’s […]

Posted in Academics, Games | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

8 Button StarCraft

By Ben Weber | Published: May 26, 2010

John Davison recently claimed that games are “Too Big and Too Hard”. I have addressed this issue by reducing StarCraft to 8 buttons. My system provides the user with a GUI containing 8 buttons and lets the AI take care of the rest of the complexity associated with normally playing StarCraft. In the fully realized […]

Posted in Academics | Comments closed