Week 13: Lucky Number 13 (Is It Really Over Already?)

Credits for the title of this blog post go to Mr. Rocha. Thank you to everyone who attended my presentation on Saturday! I hope you all had fun, and if you playtested for me, I hope you enjoyed finding out the game’s scoring algorithm and learning what your contribution to the project was really for. 

What I Learned

This project was an amazing opportunity for hands-on learning, particularly for AI and game design/development. Prior to this, I had never made an AI myself, and the prospect of it intimidated me enough that I didn’t try to do so during MIT Beaverworks, the summer program that provided the basis for my project. Though I worked a bit on the image classification CNN present in the original game, I didn’t make any major adjustments to the code. Thus, the creation of the AI assistant for my senior project allowed me to step out of my comfort zone and accomplish something I never thought I would be able to. 

The game design part of my project was also a new and exciting experience, since I haven’t had many opportunities to be on the behind-the-scenes side of games despite playing them during my free time. I enjoyed all of my discussions with my advisors about creating in-game dilemmas for players to navigate. In turn, these discussions also helped me notice similar instances of dilemma-crafting in the games I played. 

Of course, I also gained practical Python and Github experience while working on the project, which will be useful for future projects even if they don’t involve the same type of content as this one. The extensive debugging I had to do also helped me recognize common mistakes that I might make and how to avoid them in the future. 

Acknowledgements and Sidenotes

I would once again like to thank my external advisors, Rob and Jo from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, who helped me with the AI, UI, and everything else I had questions with, and also trained my AI on their supercomputer in order to achieve the necessary number of iterations (2.5 million) in a short amount of time. I would also like to thank my internal advisor, Ms. Silva, who provided many of the suggestions that inspired my current UI layout. My gratitude also goes to Lydia from MIT Lincoln Laboratory for helping me with my UI issues, and the 60+ playtesters who took time out of their schedules to play my game (and for some, attend my presentation). 

Dr. Wang’s Game Theory class also unexpectedly helped me with my project. During T2, we had a group project to design an economics experiment based on a game of our own creation, then conduct the experiment by having several classes of Basis students play the game. Through this project, I learned many skills that were useful for my senior project, including the specifics of designing and conducting game-based experiments and what types of data analysis to use in order to best interpret the data collected. 

Next Steps and Future Research

Though my research brought me some answers that I had been looking for, it also opened the doors to more questions, some of which I outlined in my final presentation. For example, I now want to know whether my AI tool will help people who have already had experience playing the game, as well as whether it could hamper players’ ability to learn. To find the answers to these questions and more, I may conduct more “sequel” experiments in the future. I also had a few ideas on how to improve the game’s UI and make it a better experience for players, starting from making the setting more realistic and adding more controls, particularly for movement. 

Recently, I was also informed of the possibility of presenting my senior project at Beaverworks 2024, which I’m thrilled about. I would love to showcase the experiment that my Beaverworks project inspired me to make, and hopefully inspire more students this year to do the same. So, if you’re attending Beaverworks for the Serious Games and AI section this summer, I might see you in the near future! (I’m not sure how to phrase this without making it sound ominous). 

Thank you so much for accompanying me on this journey of zombie-squishing and human-saving, and I hope you had as much fun as I did when I wasn’t fixing bugs. As per Simon the AI’s suggestions, I have to “scram” now. See you soon!