Finally tired of hurling birds at pigs? Students and faculty at University of California, Santa Cruz are releasing their new online game today ... and it doesn't involve slingshots.
It does, however, involve revisiting that socially-fraught period of high school: Prom Week. Choose a character out of 18 high school students and a setting (lockers, classroom, or parking lot?) and start texting.
For example, Chloe (who has a crush on a skater boy), might say, "@Jordan girl, can you pleeeeaaase talk to Naomi for me? i will owe you one big time."
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The creators studied social interactions on screen to develop rules that determine what the characters do. The game uses a sophisticated social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut.
"It was like ethnographic note-taking, but with media," said associate professor of computer science Noah Wardrip-Fruin. "The team would sit down and watch Mean Girls or Sex and the City and identify recurring patterns of social interactions."
"In the same way that Angry Birds allows you to use the physics of the game to come up with alternate ways to solve puzzles, we have a system that lets you solve social situations in different ways that are not predetermined by us," said Prom Week's lead writer, graduate student Aaron Reed.
The goal, the creators say, was to create concrete characters who can speak in complicated dialogue, and who have individual likes, dislikes and histories.
"Also, we want to support both more casual story gameplay, where players manipulate characters to find out what crazy things might happen next, and more strategic gameplay, where players try to accomplish specific goals by manipulating the social environment," the authors write on their website.
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Prom Week was selected as a finalist for the technical excellence award at the upcoming Independent Games Festival, and is in the running for the audience choice award. You can play a special preview release here, or find it on Facebook.
Tags: Fads, Technology
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