Attractiveness of real time strategy games

Abstract

Game refinement idea is a unique theory that has been proposed based on the uncertainty of game outcome. A game refinement measure was derived from the game information progress model and has been applied in the domains such as board games and sports games. The present challenge is to apply the game refinement theory in the domain of RTS games. To do so, we use StarCraft II as a testbed and introduce a concept of strategy tree in order to construct a game tree of a RTS game. Then, game refinement values are calculated and compared with other type of games. It is found that StarCraft II has a zone value of game refinement.

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“…There are much ongoing development in multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game industry such as League of Legend, Heroes of The Storms, Vainglory and so on (Furini, 2007;Pinchot, Paullet, & Rota, 2011;Resources & Irs, 2007), and there are many ongoing researches to identify how sophisticated and evolution terminology of this type of game. As the interpretation result of this research (Xiong & Iida, 2015;Xiong, Zuo, & Iida, 2017;Zuo, Xiong, & Iida, 2017a), MOBA game on PC has own characteristics with high competitiveness and macro mechanism. Game company has been trying to improve infrastructure and rules of the game (Lazzaro, 2004;Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011).…”

“…However, the game information progress given by Equation (1) is unknown during the ingame period. The presence of uncertainty during the game, often until the final moments of a game, reasonably renders the game progress to be exponential (Pratama et al, 2014;Xiong & Iida, 2015). Hence, a realistic model of the game information progress is given by Equation (2).…”

“…Higher R value than the zone value infers that the game progress is faster than others. This implies that LOL is able to attract beginners who prefer to play MOBA for entertainment purpose (Takeuchi, Ramadan, & Iida, 2014;Xiong & Iida, 2015). In this section, the ROV is analyzed using the game refinement measure to determine its game progress model.…”

Possible Interpretations for Game Refinement Measure

“…We show, in Table 1, measures of game refinement for various games [11,12,13]. From the results, we conjecture the relation between the measure of game refinement and game sophistication, as stated in Remark 1.…”

“…For the sports games such as soccer, all the attempted shots or successful shots (goals) are parts of the strategy to win the match, so they are an integral part of the game. In the domain of video games such as StarCraft II, the branching factor was calculated only by reasonable strategies to be considered as part of the winning [12]. This suggests that parameter c in Eq.…”