CLASE 8 – Estructura Ramificada

1. Interactividad
2. Creación de razas
3. Árbol de decisiones
 Puntos de inflexión
 Puntos de unificación
 Dificultad Procedural (enemigos, nivel, etc)
4. Finales alternativos
5. ESFUERZO vs. RESULTADOS
 Concepto de estrategia

* CASO DE ESTUDIO: MMORPGs

CASO DE ESTUDIO: L.A. NOIR

* CASO DE ESTUDIO: MMORPGs

Interactividad

Creación de razas

a) Firstly, a niche to fill. Something that the other races don't offer. Make them stand out as
being substantially different from one another, so preferably they should fill a niche not just
for cultural or physical traits, but for both.
b) Second, a cultural mindset which can be understood by the player but is different enough to
not feel human.
c) Third, at least one physical difference which makes them stand out as actually being a
different race.
d) Lastly, the race should somehow further the goal of the game.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

Decision Trees
As a formal approach to understanding games, game theory looks at games as a
series of strategic decisions
made by the players of a game. What does it mean to reduce a game to its strategic
decisions? One common
game theory method is to create a decision tree for a game. A decision tree is a
branching tree-style diagram
that outlines all of the possible moves a player can make in a game. Decision trees are
a common way of
flow-charting interactive experiences. For example, if you are programming an
interactive story that has a
hypertext structure, you might draw a diagram that shows all of the links between the
different parts of your
story. This kind of diagram would be a decision tree.
The complexity of games leads to a system of many posible actions. Which actions can
happen at a given moment is contingent on the current state of the game.
Important Rules:

 Time in the game takes place in turns or other discrete units.

 Players make a finite number of clear decisions that have knowable
outcomes.
 The game is finite (it can't go on forever).

Bimatrix and Zero-Sum

Two Players
Here is an example of a simultaneous 2-player game:

Example 1 ADVERTISING: Two companies share a market, in which they currently

make$5,000,000 each. Both need to determine whether they should advertise. For each company
adver-tising costs $2,000,000 and captures $3,000,000 from the competitor provided the competitor
doesn’t advertise. What should the companies do?

Let’s call the two companies A and B. If both don’t advertise, they get $5,000,000 each. If both
advertise, both lower their gain to $3,000,000. If A advertises, but B doesn’t, A gets $6,000,000 and
B only $2,000,000, and conversely if B advertises and A doesn’t. The payoff pattern is shown in the
following table. The numbers are in millions of dollars. The rows correspond to the options of
player A, and the columns correspond to the options of player B. The entries are payoff for A and
payoff for B provided the corresponding options are chosen, separated by a comma.

B advertises B doesn’t advertise

A advertises 3, 3 6, 2
A doesn’t advertise 2, 6 5, 5

Whenever we have two players, we often name them Ann and Beth. Assume Ann has k1 options
and Beth has k2 options. We want to display the different payoffs for Ann and Beth, depending on
the different choices they have. Each of the k1 k2 outcomes has payoffs for Ann and Beth attached.
Usually this is visualized in a table, the normal form with n rows, corresponding to Ann’s options,
and m columns, corresponding to Beth’s options. Such a table is called a n m bimatrix. The entries
in the cells are payoffs for Ann and Beth, separated by a comma.

Two Players, Zero-sum

A game is called zero-sum if the sum of payoffs equals zero for any outcome. That means that the
winnings of the winning players are paid by the losses of the losing players.
For zero-sum two-player games, the bimatrix representation of the game can be simplified: the
payoff of the second player doesn’t have to be displayed, since it is the negative of the payoff of the
first player.
Example 2 Assume we are playing ROCK-SCISSORS-PAPER for one dollar. Then the payoff
matrix is:

Rock Scissors Paper

 Rock 0 1 -1
Scissors -1 0 1
Paper 1 -1 0

The first cell says “0”, which stands for “0; 0” a payoff of 0 for both players. The second cell entry
of “1” should be read as “1; 1”, a payoff of 1 for Ann which has to be paid by Beth, therefore a
payoff of 1 for Beth.

Three or More Players

If we have more than two players, we need another systematic way to generate the needed k1; k2…
kn cells corresponding to the different outcomes, into which we write the n payoffs for the n
players. Here is an example:

Example 3 LEGISLATORS’ VOTE: Three legislators vote whether they allow themselves a raise in
salary of $2000 per year. Since voters are observing the vote, there is some loss of face for a
legislator to vote for a raise. Let’s assume that the legislators estimate that loss of face is worth
$1000 per year. What happens if all three vote at the same time? (This game is a variant of the game
described in [K2007]).
This is a simultaneous three-player game. It is best visualized with two matrices. Player A chooses
the matrix, B chooses the row, and C chooses the column. The payoffs (in thousands of dollars) are:

A votes for a raise A votes against it

C votes C votes C votes C votes

for raise against it for raise against it
B votes 1, 1, 1 1, 1, 2 B votes 2, 1, 1 0, -1, 0
for raise for raise
B votes 1, 2, 1 -1, 0, 0 B votes 0,0, -1 0, 0, 0
against it against it