Young to Serve as Research Director, Board Member of Triangle Game Industry Group

R. Michael Young (pictured), associate professor in Computer Science, has been named Research Director for the Triangle Game Initiative (TGI), a non-profit trade association for the Raleigh-Durham, NC interactive entertainment industry. Young is also a member of the organization’s board of directors. The Triangle Game Initiative promotes the Triangle region’s interactive entertainment industry, including immersive technologies, video game development and publishing and game media, through brochures, newsletters, conferences, tradeshows, summits and other promotional activities aimed at attracting other game companies and employees to North Carolina. TGI aims to create a community of industry professionals within the Triangle that can share best practices and develop a hub of knowledge that can attract the best talent and companies.  To that end, they organize and sponsor the Triangle Games Conference, an annual industry conference bringing together game developers and students from across the nation to discuss best practices and new trends in the game industry.

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Young receives narrative structure NSF grant

Computer Science professor R. Michael Young (pictured) recently received a $497,860 grant from the National Science Foundation to research narrative within games and virtual worlds.

“The project will have a significant impact on our understanding of the relationships between computation and cognition, specifically in the context of narrative,” according to the award abstract. The project, titled CIRCMNaVE (Character Intention Revision and Conflict in Mediated Narrative Virtual Environments), will develop new cognitively informed models of narrative action and will use these models to control characters within a 3D virtual environment.  The same models will then be used to make effective predictions about the results of users’ understanding of the stories that they experience in the game worlds.

“CIRCMNaVE builds on existing ideas about narrative drawn from psychologists, narrative theorists and others to create a computer model of how specific elements of stories work,” Young said. “By building precise models of things like conflict between characters or the way that characters' plans and knowledge about the world around them changes over time, we can begin to create stories on demand whose content contain the kinds of structure we expect from well-written human stories. Except these will be stories created by a computer program and, unlike conventional narrative media, will be entirely interactive.”

The project will focus on new knowledge representation schemes for the control of narrative action, looking primarily at the structures of conflict and goal dynamics for computer-controlled characters within virtual worlds.  To validate the project's models, Young will lead the effort to formally validate the results via large-scale experiments.  "Drawing ideas like these from outside of computer science helps make the resulting software match well with how people think about narrative or with what they expect in a story-like experience," says Young.  "But because we're borrowing heavily from these other disciplines, it's critical that the work we do be clearly evaluated -- otherwise we run the risk of getting our models wrong and not even knowing."

Young and his team plan to release a series of 8 to 10 papers on this project during the next three years.  More about the project can be found at the CIRCMNaVE project page [here].