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DATA Agent

From EverybodyWiki Bios & Wiki



DATA Agent is a suite of computer adventure games generated based on open data by the DATA Agent system[1]. The DATA Agent system builds on prior work in open data techniques and procedural content generation[2] as well as the design conventions of adventure games. DATA Agent was designed and developed through a collaboration between the Game Innovation lab at the New York University (Gabriella A. B. Barros, Michael Cerny Green, Julian Togelius) and the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta (Antonios Liapis).

Background[edit]

DATA Agent is the third installment in the Data Adventures series which aims to explore how data on the semantic web can be used to generate structured point-and-click adventure games[3]. The first instance in the Data Adventures series is the generator of the same name[4] which builds linear experiences, where players must find a target NPC starting from the house of another NPC. The second installment is WikiMystery[5] which generates entire point-and-click murder mysteries using minimal human assistance using a single name (that of the victim) as input. Everything in WikiMystery corresponds to some snippet of open data, be it the physical locations of cities on the world map or the background of the building the player was currently located.

Gameplay[edit]

In-game screenshot of DATA Agent

The player takes the role of an agent in the Detective Agency of Time Anomalies (DATA) tasked with solving a bizarre mystery. An assassin has traveled back in time and killed a famous person, masquerading as another famous person somehow related to the victim. Since the assassin does not know everything about the person they impersonate, the DATA Agent must find in a lineup of suspects which one does not have all their facts right. The correct facts about the suspects can be found by talking to other people in different cities. Finding the suspects themselves is no easy task either: the agent must talk to other people, read books and break into dark and locked places.

Generation Algorithms[edit]

Most of the game mechanics in DATA Agent require the player to interact with real-world data, transformed into game elements such as locations, non-player characters, items, books and facts. The centerpiece is the murder victim, which is chosen by a designer before the game is generated. Around the victim, the generator starts by finding possible suspects among people with Wikipedia articles that share as many common attributes with the victim as possible (e.g. the same birth date or the same thesis advisor) but also have different attributes with other suspects. Once suspects are found, one of them is randomly chosen to be the culprit (the time-traveling doppelganger) and one of their facts is changed. Each suspect is linked back to the victim through a chain of entities in the Wikipedia knowledge ontology (essentially, finding the Wikipedia: Six degrees of Wikipedia); those links are transformed into in-game characters or books, placed in locations around the world based on their origin (e.g. their birthplace) or places found in the chain. Dialog with characters is generated based on templates to point to the next clue (unlocking a new character, item and/or location) but can also provide some information about the character (such as their date of birth or subject). Finally, some puzzle elements are added by "locking" some locations and ensuring that "keys" can be found by the player (torches to unlock dark places, crowbars to unlock chained places). The core data sources of DATA Agent game generation are DBPedia (a structured database derived from Wikipedia) for finding associations between people, OpenStreetMap for finding the maps for in-game locations and Wikimedia Commons for images of NPCs and items.

Game Release[edit]

The DATA Agent games were released on itch.io for free in August 2018[6]. A demo of the game can be played online (with one case). The complete game with almost 100 cases can be downloaded and played on Windows and Mac systems.

Reception[edit]

DATA Agent has received attention from the indie game community for its innovative use of real-world data. The game was primarily identified as "an example of how information can be procured and repurposed into the start of a compelling game"[7] rather than in terms of the gameplay itself. It was covered in the 3rd issue of zine SEEDS[8]. DATA Agent was also among the 2018 picks[9] by indiegamesplus.com.

References[edit]

  1. Michael Cerny Green, Gabriella A. B. Barros, Antonios Liapis and Julian Togelius: "DATA Agent" in Proceedings of the 13th Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2018.
  2. Marie Gustafsson Friberger and Julian Togelius "Generating game content from open data," in Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games Conference. ACM, 2012.
  3. Gabriella A. B. Barros, Michael Cerny Green, Antonios Liapis and Julian Togelius: "Data-driven Design: A Case for Maximalist Game Design," in Proceedings of the International Conference of Computational Creativity, 2018.
  4. Gabriella A. B. Barros, Antonios Liapis, Julian Togelius: "Data Adventures," in Proceedings of the FDG workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, 2015.
  5. Gabriella A. B. Barros, Antonios Liapis and Julian Togelius: "Murder Mystery Generation from Open Data," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Creativity. 2016.
  6. DATA Agent game download
  7. Outwit time-travelling murderers in AI-generated Data Agent
  8. Real-world Data as a Seed in SEEDS issue 3, edited by Jupiter Hadley and Dann Sullivan
  9. Indie Games Plus Highlights of 2018 – Dann’s Picks

Resubmitting after more external references were added (and a warmer welcome to the game release was received).[edit]


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