Scientific project on MMORPGs
Posted: 20 Oct 2014, 23:56
Dear TMW community,
firstly, let me congratulate you on a beautiful piece of (quite complex) open-source software. My name is Markus Schatten, I am an assistant professor and head of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb. I have recently won a 3 year grant from the Croatian Science Foundation for a project entitled ModelMMORPG - Large-Scale Multi-Agent Modeling of Massively Multi-player On-line Role-playing Games (http://ai.foi.hr/modelmmorpg). While this is probably the first scientific project ever to have 5 dashes in its title, I think another thing might be of interest to you: we have decided to use TMW as a platform for testing some of our hypotheses.
What we want to study is, at one hand, the organizational behavior of players (e.g. how do multiple players organize in order to solve quests), and how can we build artificial agents to do the same, on the other. So, the letter is a bit problematic, since in essence we will be implementing bots that are able to organize to solve quests. Still, we will be using our private servers and will make certain modifications to the code so they will be more or less useless to a wider audience.
Also, since we want to study organizational behavior, which is only partly needed in some TMW quests, we will implement a special "organizational" quest that shall hopefully foster players to organize so we can analyze their behavior, and build it into our agents.
We are fully commited to open source, and would like to contribute back to the project whenever there is something that might be of interest to TMW! All software to be developed during the project will be made freely available (probably under GPL). Also, it would be great if we could have some support from the community (mostly regarding code documentation and/or explanation, but also feedback from possible players).
So, my question would be, what would be the best model of cooperation with the community? I would propose for us to create a fork of the servers' code (since we have to modify some of the code and add scripts for the quest), but I'm open to other options. If I understand well the forum and IRC are your prefered channels of communication? Are there any additional things you would like us to take care of?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
With best regards
M.S.
firstly, let me congratulate you on a beautiful piece of (quite complex) open-source software. My name is Markus Schatten, I am an assistant professor and head of Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Faculty of Organization and Informatics, University of Zagreb. I have recently won a 3 year grant from the Croatian Science Foundation for a project entitled ModelMMORPG - Large-Scale Multi-Agent Modeling of Massively Multi-player On-line Role-playing Games (http://ai.foi.hr/modelmmorpg). While this is probably the first scientific project ever to have 5 dashes in its title, I think another thing might be of interest to you: we have decided to use TMW as a platform for testing some of our hypotheses.
What we want to study is, at one hand, the organizational behavior of players (e.g. how do multiple players organize in order to solve quests), and how can we build artificial agents to do the same, on the other. So, the letter is a bit problematic, since in essence we will be implementing bots that are able to organize to solve quests. Still, we will be using our private servers and will make certain modifications to the code so they will be more or less useless to a wider audience.
Also, since we want to study organizational behavior, which is only partly needed in some TMW quests, we will implement a special "organizational" quest that shall hopefully foster players to organize so we can analyze their behavior, and build it into our agents.
We are fully commited to open source, and would like to contribute back to the project whenever there is something that might be of interest to TMW! All software to be developed during the project will be made freely available (probably under GPL). Also, it would be great if we could have some support from the community (mostly regarding code documentation and/or explanation, but also feedback from possible players).
So, my question would be, what would be the best model of cooperation with the community? I would propose for us to create a fork of the servers' code (since we have to modify some of the code and add scripts for the quest), but I'm open to other options. If I understand well the forum and IRC are your prefered channels of communication? Are there any additional things you would like us to take care of?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
With best regards
M.S.