Tools to Explore Video Games

Want to explore video games? Two UCSC students made some cool tools.

“In a UC-Santa Cruz research lab dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of computer games, two graduate students have combined linguistics and computational theory to create a new multidimensional library of 12,000 computer games. The web-based tools, GameNet and GameSage, offer novel ways to discover similar types of games.” And different types of games; if you use GameNet you can enter the name of a computer game and get the 50 most related games and the 50 most unrelated games. The 1991 game Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is apparently completely unrelated to Dance Dance Revolution.

And then there’s GameSage. “GameSage is a tool that takes free-text input describing an idea for a videogame and lists the existing games that are most related to that idea. This tool utilizes the notion in LSA of folding in, whereby a new document that was not used during model training is fitted with a representation in the semantic space derived by the model. By treating the user’s input text (which specifies her game idea) as a corpus document (on par with the videogame Wikipedia articles we used to train our LSA model) and folding it in, we are able to derive an LSA vector for the idea.”