|
Mission
The Gamics Lab's line of research is focused on the technical side of computer games including artificial intelligence, software engineering, computer graphics and, in general, computational problems. At the same time the Lab promotes publicity of research related to computer games and its influence on our modern society making game research more generally acceptable. The Lab also serves as a tower of strength to all other research related to computer games the at University of Helsinki .
The term gamics was coined by Tomi Pasanen to denote the algorithmical aspects of computers games in a broad sense.
Background and Motivation
The computer games are here to stay: the amount of money involved in them is greater than that in movies forming a real big industry. So far, only small movements have been done in Finland to take these facts into account, and if we think that the base function of science is to explain and study important phenomena of our modern society, we have to do something. Games clearly have a great influence on the every day life of people through time spent on playing and through the ever-growing virtual world called Internet with possibilities for interacting with other human beings without real physical contact.
Education for the needs of the gaming industry has been hidden but ever growing teaching area at computer science departments. Our purpose is to expose the hidden teaching and make it more extensive. Using games as application targets in teaching and research is very simple to realize and it is clearly motivating for most students: a deeper insight into theory is obtained through creative and amusing programming caused by visual feedback given in virtual simulations of games: Were the actions performed really the actions we desired?
To develop high-quality games nowadays, game developing companies attempt to use all essential results and concepts of computer science. To mention a few arguments we give the following:
- To accomplish large software projects workers need a good understanding of programming concepts and software engineering; this is needed especially when, as the base of a project, a game engine is built by the workers;
- To create human-like activities for non-player entities in a virtual world, very sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques are clearly needed;
- To look great nowadays computer games need nice, smooth-scrolling and realistic graphics, which definitely is not a trivial task to create;
- Every programmer needs a good comprehension of the computational cost of different solutions in order to decide on implementation details while creating fast functioning games; most games are such.
The list is far from being exhaustive, lacking, for example, 3D-modeling and sound and music production, but it shows that focusing on computer games means actually addressing the most central research areas of computer science with their application.