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Beep! Beep! Boom!: towards a planning model of Coyote and Road Runner cartoons

Published: 26 April 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In current commercial games, there is generally a lack of physical humor; most humor in games is largely linguistic (dialog) and static (hand-authored). In this paper we propose A Cartoon Making Experience (ACME), a system that models physical humor based on the structure of humorous episodes in The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons. Player's are able to interact with ACME by adding and removing objects from the world. Using a hierarchal task network (HTN) planner, the game plans out a gag based on the item attributes as well as the state of the world. In this paper we provide an analysis of the humor in The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons, position ACME in the context of work on computational humor, and describe our preliminary implementation of ACME.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '09: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
April 2009
386 pages
ISBN:9781605584379
DOI:10.1145/1536513
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SASDG: The Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 26 April 2009

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Author Tags

  1. artificial intelligence
  2. cartoons
  3. computational humor
  4. planning

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Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2024)Amorphous Fortress: Exploring Emergent Behavior and Complexity in Multi-Agent 0-Player Games2024 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC60901.2024.10612153(01-10)Online publication date: 30-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Symbolic Planning in Computer GamesEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_269(1788-1792)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
  • (2019)What Could Go Wrong?Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts10.1145/3341215.3356273(805-812)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
  • (2019)Symbolic Planning in Computer GamesEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_269-1(1-6)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2019
  • (2017)The Narrative Logic of Rube Goldberg MachinesInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_9(104-116)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2017
  • (2016)Mischief Humor in Smart and Playable CitiesPlayable Cities10.1007/978-981-10-1962-3_11(235-253)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2016
  • (2016)Human Avatars in Playful and Humorous EnvironmentsAdvances in Affective and Pleasurable Design10.1007/978-3-319-41661-8_65(671-682)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2016
  • (2015)Non-Player Characters and Artificial IntelligenceGamification10.4018/978-1-4666-8200-9.ch024(488-514)Online publication date: 2015
  • (2014)Non-Player Characters and Artificial IntelligencePsychology, Pedagogy, and Assessment in Serious Games10.4018/978-1-4666-4773-2.ch007(127-152)Online publication date: 2014
  • (2012)Smart terrain causality chains for adventure-game puzzle generation2012 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)10.1109/CIG.2012.6374173(328-334)Online publication date: Sep-2012
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