Automatic Identification and Generation of Highlight Cinematics in 3D Games

Abstract

Online multiplayer gaming has emerged as a popular form of entertainment. During these games, the players' main focus is usually placed on achieving the objectives that must be completed to win the game. While these tasks may be of the primary interest to the players, over the course of the game their interactions may result in interesting narratives that go unnoticed. This may be due to the imperfect information that a player has access to or as a result of their attention being directed towards accomplishing the goals of the game. This thesis presents Afterthought, a system that will allow players to view these emergent narratives after completing their gameplay session. The tool accomplishes this through logging the actions that occur during the play of the game, analyzing the log and retrieving interesting narratives, generating the cinematic discourse for visualization, rendering the videos of the narratives, and finally uploading the videos to a video sharing site so that they are easily viewable by all participants. This thesis concludes with preliminary human subjects evaluation of the system's effectiveness.