Computer Games and Allied Technology ‘08

Singapore has just organized and played host to an international gaming conference held at Suntec Convention Centre over the last three days. The conference is quite a mouthful, but here goes: “International Conference & Industry Symposium on Computer Games; Animation, Multimedia, IPTV & Edutainment“.

It’s a middle-sized gaming conference as these things go (about 66 papers were presented in total), with emphasis on applied research, newest trends, gaming projects and work currently undertaken by universities and higher-learning institutions around the world. I was there at the three day event that lasted from the 28-30th April (and had to miss a number of lessons too - apologies to my SWEN and APEL classes who now need to suffer my make-ups!). I presented an extended paper I wrote on my favorite topic, i.e. player behavior in MMOGs, elicited some laughs when I explained incidents of how grief players love to gank newbies 10 minutes after characer creation, and generally kept the audience interested long enough, hopefully.

Some of the really interesting papers and talks given by other persons included a team of researchers from Germany who after analyzing network traffic in hundreds of Unreal Tournament 2004 sessions came up with several interesting findings after peering through their data, e.g. like how much more data packets get generated in the network when an experienced UT player trashes a noob.

There was also an amazing talk given by other researchers from the very local NTU - School of Computer Engineering on their software that simulates very accurately crowd behavior. They ran demos that showed how AI agents in large crowds negotiate walking paths based on realistic human preferences and social conditioning, all in real-time. I think the crowd, and this is including wizened old professors who’ve spent decades studying algorithms theory, advanced mathematics, terrain modelling, were impressed.

All really cutting-edge stuff that we’ll see in games - if we’re lucky - maybe 5 to 10 years from now. I have a copy of the proceedings (i.e. collection of the papers), so if there’s any GET student who’d like to take a look at the papers, just ask your GET lecturer or me.