Automatized Summarization of Multiplayer Games

Automatized Summarization of Multiplayer Games Peter Mindek∗ Ladislav Cmolˇ ´ık† Vienna University of Technology Czech Technical University in Prague Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms Faculty of Electrical Engineering Ivan Viola‡ Eduard Groller¨ § Vienna University of Technology Vienna University of Technology Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms Stefan Bruckner¶ University of Bergen Department of Informatics Abstract Multiplayer video games often contain complex scenes with multiple dynamic foci. The scenes and the game events are viewed by the individual players from different positions. The view of each player We present a novel method for creating automatized gameplay is relevant to their part of the gameplay. If an observer watches the dramatization of multiplayer video games. The dramatization players’ views, or some additional overview provided by cameras serves as a visual form of guidance through dynamic 3D scenes observing the scene, it is not trivial to see the big picture of what has with multiple foci, typical for such games. Our goal is to convey happened during the game. It is likely that some important events interesting aspects of the gameplay by animated sequences creat- will be missed, because they occurred while the observer watched ing a summary of events which occurred during the game. Our a different view at that time, since the foci are possibly overlapping technique is based on processing many cameras, which we refer in time but not in space. However, it is possible to arrange the in- to as a flock of cameras, and events captured during the gameplay, dividual camera views into a story summarizing the gameplay and which we organize into a so-called event graph. Each camera has conveying the big picture. a lifespan with a certain time interval and its parameters such as position or look-up vector are changing over time. Additionally, There are various situations where composing a summary of the during its lifespan each camera is assigned an importance function, gameplay might be beneficial. State-of-the-art game consoles in- which is dependent on the significance of the structures that are be- clude functionality for the recording of the gameplay and sharing ing captured by the camera. The images captured by the cameras it on social media. There are online services, such as twitch.tv are composed into a single continuous video using a set of opera- [Twitch Interactive, Inc. 2011], where users can stream gameplays tors based on cinematographic effects. The sequence of operators is of various video games. There are also tournaments in multiplayer selected by traversing the event graph and looking for specific pat- video games, where the summaries of individual matches are cre- terns corresponding to the respective operators. In this way, a large ated to be shown to a wider audience. The summaries are also number of cameras can be processed to generate an informative used by the participating teams to analyze the gameplay in order to visual story presenting the gameplay. Our compositing approach design strategies, detect mistakes made by individual players, and supports insets of camera views to account for several important improve their overall performance. There is also a practice of us- cameras simultaneously. Additionally, we create seamless transi- ing video games for creating cinematic productions by navigating tions between individual selected camera views in order to preserve the game characters according to a pre-defined screenplay, called temporal continuity, which helps the user to follow the virtual story Machinima [Berkeley 2006]. These developments demonstrate that of the gameplay. there is a demand for tools aiding in the creation of gameplay summaries or visual narratives. CR Categories: I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image To create a visual story of a gameplay, various cinematographic ef- Generation—Viewing Algorithms; I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: fects can be used. However, some specifics regarding multiplayer Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Animation games have to be taken into account in order to produce a meaningful story. The very fast pace of multiplayer games, as well as Keywords: animation, storytelling, game visualization many concurrent events require that hard cuts are avoided when- ever possible. Instead, it is essential to provide linkage cues in the portrayal of the individual events, such as continuous camera tran- 1 Introduction sitions when portraying a sequence of events occurring at different locations. ∗e-mail: [email protected] The aim of this work is to design a method for creating animated †e-mail: [email protected] summaries of gameplays captured by many dynamic cameras, as in ‡e-mail: [email protected] multiplayer video games. The summaries have to portray many dy- §e-mail: [email protected] namic events, possibly occurring at the same time, to facilitate easy ¶e-mail: [email protected] understanding of the game action. During the gameplay, the cameras and important game events are recorded. Afterwards, a summary is created which shows the views from the cameras in such a way that the displayed events are meaningfully linked together and they compose a coherent story narrating the gameplay. By integrating events associated with individual players, and by smoothly transitioning between them rather than splitting the gameplay into separate segments, our method provides an output suitable for analyzing the gameplay itself. Aspects such as interaction be- previous step are presented. The user watching the story also has tween players or whole teams, and causal dependencies of indi- the possibility to interrupt it and perform data exploration on his vidual events are hard to convey by conventional methods, such as own. Yu et al. [2010] propose a system which extracts events from sequentially showing the views of all players. time-varying datasets and organizes them into an event graph. By traversing the event graph, an animation with a narrative structure To efficiently portray the linkage of the events, we record their is created which shows the events in a meaningful order. We also causality, as defined by the game rules and implied by the game- employ the concept of event graphs to organize the events extracted play. Using this information, we arrange the events into a structure from the video game. However, we use it to merge views captured called event graph. Additionally, each event is assigned a camera by the flock of cameras into a continuous animated sequence. This which captures it. This is possible since the events are linked to the allows us to illustrate dynamic scenes of the video games with mul- players and/or their locations, which are in turn linked to the indi- tiple temporally-overlapping foci. Viola et al. [2006] propose a vidual cameras. The event graph together with the linkage between technique for focusing on selected features of a volume dataset. A the events and the corresponding cameras contain sufficient infor- viewpoint showing the selected feature in the most informative way mation to reconstruct the story which visually narrates the game- is determined. An animation switches between viewpoints for dif- play. ferent features. This technique is complementary to our method, In addition to describing the gameplay by the event graph, we pro- since we only focus on compiling the views into a coherent sum- pose two concepts: flock of cameras and ManyCams. The flock of mary, not on selecting adequate viewpoints for individual cameras cameras is a set of cameras whose parameters change dynamically to capture the scene or the dataset in a certain way. over time. Each camera has a specified lifespan. During its lifes- Creating summaries of computer games has been examined as well. pan, a continuous importance function is assigned to the camera. Halper and Masuch [2003] propose a method for extracting game It describes the importance of the corresponding captured events in events by analyzing computer game variables to evaluate how in- time. The flock of cameras is a structure which holds all cameras teresting individual time-steps of the gameplay are. The authors relevant to the gameplay. present several methods for merging these events into scenes, which ManyCams is a method for selecting the most interesting views then compose the story of the gameplay. Cheong at al. [2008] captured by the flock of cameras. By merging these views, and present ViGLS - a system for visualizing gameplay summaries from inserting smooth transitions between them, a story is created which game logs. The game logs are analyzed and sequences of sum- visually narrates the gameplay. The generated video is a lineariza- mary actions are extracted from them. These are then sent to a tion of the gameplay, which has a parallel structure with multiple game engine, which replays the actions to generate a visual sum- events occurring at different spatial locations, possibly overlapping mary. The goal of our work is to extend these approaches by pro- in time. ManyCams uses the event graph and the flock of cameras, viding visual links between individual events so that multiple con- which are constructed during the gameplay, to create a video sum- current foci occurring in the dynamic game scene can be captured mary for a post-mortem visual analysis of the course of the game. by the composed summary. Our method linearizes the gameplay, so that continuous dramatizations with a parallel structure can be created. Therefore, our method is able to create summaries of complex gameplays, such as those of multiplayer games, where events 2 Related Work are observed by multiple cameras, and where it is important to illustrate causality between the events. There are various techniques for integrating visual data into a con- An important aspect of creating visual narratives and informative densed form which can be presented as a story.

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