Author Archives: Ben Weber

Once again, the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2010) is hosting a Mario competition. This time, they’ve added a level generation track to the competition. The goal is to procedurally generate Mario levels that are entertaining. EIS is working on an entry and here’s what we have so far: I’ve made a […]

Games are increasingly making use of gestures as a way for players to interact in game worlds. While enabling players to perform a large number of actions in the game world, the use of gestures in games can also confuse players accustomed to conventional controllers. Bob Mitchell’s recent talk at UC Santa Cruz discussed developing games for 2020 and one of the points he made was that gestures are going to become prevalent in games due to the introduction of new interfaces. However, it is first necessary to build standard definitions of gestures in order for players to build expectations of how to interact with games.

One of my research goals is to build an agent that mimics human gameplay. To achieve this challenging goal, I have implemented chat functionality in EISBot. Once every thirty seconds, EISBot randomly selects a message from a pool of 75 messages and sends it to the console. The results can be quite convincing:

Play against the EISBot! Download here: http://eis.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/eisbot.zip So far, I’ve tested the bot versus the avid StarCraft fanbase. It pulls out a 10% win rate versus hardcore gamers.  Can you beat it? Play it and send me the replay!!! Note: playing against the EISBot requires two machines capable of playing StarCraft.