I'm a PhD student in computer science working in artificial intelligence.
My dissertation work-in-progress is on automated support for game design. This
has a number of targets, from enabling game-design experts to prototype and
refine design ideas more quickly; to enabling novices to build interesting
small games; to allowing games or parts of games to be automatically
generated; and to advancing game studies (in the media-studies sense) by
formally modeling the process. My thesis research focuses on assisting
game designers in their prototyping process.
I've done some work on drama management, and longer ago on the periphery
of computer music. Lurking in the todo pile is some
as-yet-unpublished stuff on machine learning, mainly local regression methods
and regression forests.
I'm working in Michael
Mateas's Expressive Intelligence Studio (EIS), now located at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. I've also collaborated with Charles Isbell's pfunk research group, and Alex Gray's FASTlab.
We're working on methods to formally model aspects of videogames and the
game-design process, which has applications ranging from design assistance to
automated design to game studies. My thesis research is focusing on the problem
of helping game designers (mainly experts) in the prototyping process, but I've
also done some work ahead of that in laying the groundwork more generally.
The
AI*IA and IUI papers propose factoring game design into four areas: abstract
mechanics, concrete representation, thematic (real-world) references, and
player input. They additionally do some early work in reasoning about real-world
references, e.g. for automatically generating "skinned" versions of games. The
IUI paper more generally argues for the usefulness of interactive game-design
assistants. The AIIDE paper proposes representing and reasoning about game
mechanics in formal logic, using the event calculus.
Mark J. Nelson and Michael Mateas. Recombinable game mechanics for automated design
support.
In Proceedings of the 4th Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital
Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2008), Palo Alto, California, USA,
October 2008.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. An interactive game-design assistant.
In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Intelligent User
Interfaces (IUI 2008), pages 90–98, Maspalomas, Gran Canaria,
Spain, January 2008.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. Towards automated game design.
In AI*IA 2007: Artificial Intelligence and Human-Oriented
Computing, pages 626–637. Springer, 2007.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4733.
Declarative Optimization-Based Drama Management (DODM)
Drama managers watch a game (or other interactive experience) as it progresses,
and intervene when necessary to keep the experience interesting and in line
with an author's goals. DODM is a particular approach in which an author
declaratively specifies what it would mean for the experience to go well, along
with an abstraction of the story and a set of interventions the system can
make. The system then optimizes its interventions according to the given
criteria.
The basic approach was proposed by Joe Bates in 1992 and developed by Peter
Weyhrauch in 1997. We've since made a number of modifications, both to the
conceptual formulation and to the technical implementation.
Mark J.
Nelson and Michael Mateas. Another look at search-based drama management.
In Proceedings of the 23rd AAAI Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, Chicago, USA, July 2008.
A shorter version appeared in the proceedings of AAMAS 2008.
Sooraj Bhat,
David L. Roberts, Mark J. Nelson, Charles L. Isbell, Jr., and Michael
Mateas. A globally optimal algorithm for TTD-MDPs.
In Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2007), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA,
May 2007.
David L.
Roberts, Mark J. Nelson, Charles L. Isbell, Jr., Michael Mateas, and
Michael L. Littman. Targeting specific distributions of trajectories in MDPs.
In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(AAAI 2006), Boston, USA, July 2006.
I evaluated MIDI performance as part of previous work (2003–2004)
with Belinda Thom at Harvey Mudd College. We were trying to
discover interesting things about jazz improvisation, but got
sidetracked into measuring the performance of our MIDI equipment,
since we needed to be able to put error bars on the data. You may
also want to take a look at the project's
site, which has code, circuit diagrams, and everything else you
need to run your own tests, as well as the detailed results of our
tests.
Mark J.
Nelson and Belinda Thom. A survey of real-time MIDI performance.
In Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for
Musical Expression (NIME 2004), pages 35–38, Hamamatsu, Japan, June
2004.
