Asynchronous Game Research Articles

Playing Political Science - Leveraging Game Design in the Post-Secondary Classroom

The Multiplayer Classroom describes how a course in computer game design can be based on the same structure as a computer game (Sheldon 2012). Students play this game through the entire term. Sheldon also had students take on roles based on Bartle’s taxonomy of player types (Bartle 1996), leveraging it to structure group work and accommodating different learning types. During the Winter term of 2015, I taught two courses in Political Science at the University of Calgary: Topics in Comparative Politics in the Industrialized World and Introduction to Public Administration. Having previously leveraged gamification principles in teaching extensively (Hellström 2015), operationalizing Sheldon’s design was a logical next step. This paper describes that effort, including challenges and opportunities for how Sheldon’s design can be used. The design requires a complete change in the point of departure for the course, from the implementation of Bartle’s Taxonomy, to how the curriculum is presented to the students through potentially asynchronous game events rather than through the linear structure of the classic lecture series. These techniques will be familiar to those who are acquainted with computer games or live action role-playing (larp). The paper will also include some reflections on potential for future research in terms of how game-based learning could enhance the post-secondary political science classroom.

Spatial competitive games with disingenuously delayed positions

During the last decades, spatial games have received great attention from researchers showing the behavior of populations of players over time in a spatial structure. One of the main factors which can greatly affect the behavior of such populations is the updating scheme used to apprise new strategies of players. Synchronous updating is the most common updating strategy in which all players update their strategy at the same time. In order to be able to describe the behavior of populations more realistically several asynchronous updating schemes have been proposed. Asynchronous game does not use a universal clock and players can update their strategy at different time steps during the play.In this paper, we introduce a new type of asynchronous strategy updating in which some of the players hide their updated strategy from their neighbors for several time steps. It is shown that this behavior can change the behavior of populations but does not necessarily lead to a higher payoff for the dishonest players. The paper also shows that with dishonest players, the average payoff of players is less than what they think they get, while they are not aware of their neighbors' true strategy.

Geometry of Synthesis II: From Games to Delay-Insensitive Circuits

This paper extends previous work on the compilation of higher-order imperative languages into digital circuits [Ghica, D.R., Geometry of Synthesis: a structured approach to VLSI design, in: POPL, 2007, pp. 363–375.]. We introduce concurrency, an essential feature in the context of hardware compilation and we re-use an existing game model to simplify correctness proofs. The target designs we compile to are asynchronous event-logic circuits, which naturally match the asynchronous game model of the language.

Asynchronous games 2: The true concurrency of innocence

In game semantics, the higher-order value passing mechanisms of the λ -calculus are decomposed as sequences of atomic actions exchanged by a Player and its Opponent. Seen from this angle, game semantics is reminiscent of trace semantics in concurrency theory, where a process is identified to the sequences of requests it generates in the course of time. Asynchronous game semantics is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two subjects, and to see mainstream game semantics as a refined and interactive form of trace semantics. Asynchronous games are positional games played on Mazurkiewicz traces, which reformulate (and generalize) the familiar notion of arena game. The interleaving semantics of λ -terms, expressed as innocent strategies, may be analysed in this framework, in the perspective of true concurrency. The analysis reveals that innocent strategies are positional strategies regulated by forward and backward confluence properties. This captures, we believe, the essence of innocence. We conclude the article by defining a non-uniform variant of the λ -calculus, in which the game semantics of a λ -term is formulated directly as a trace semantics, performing the syntactic exploration or parsing of that λ -term.

Asynchronous game of life

This paper proposes the 8-state asynchronous equivalence of the well-known game of life (GL). Our cellular automaton, called asynchronous game of life, simulates exactly the behavior of the GL, such as universal computation and self-organization, no matter whether the update of cells is simultaneous or independent according to some updating scheme, like a step-driven or time-driven method [see BioSystems 51 (1999) 123]. We employ the updating scheme of Blok and Bergersen [Phys. Rev. E 59 (1999) 3876] such that at every time step each cell has a certain probability to be updated, and investigate the statistical properties of our model through power spectral analyses.

Asynchronous game of life

This paper proposes the 8-state asynchronous equivalence of the well-known game of life (GL). Our cellular automaton, called asynchronous game of life, simulates exactly the behavior of the GL, such as universal computation and self-organization, no matter whether the update of cells is simultaneous or independent according to some updating scheme, like a step-driven or time-driven method [see BioSystems 51 (1999) 123]. We employ the updating scheme of Blok and Bergersen [Phys. Rev. E 59 (1999) 3876] such that at every time step each cell has a certain probability to be updated, and investigate the statistical properties of our model through power spectral analyses.