Mechanics Automatically Recognized via Interactive Observation: Jumping
This work addresses the understanding of game mechanics for game developers and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The paper tackled the problem of modeling and analyzing jumping mechanics across NES platform games by using a modified emulator to semi-automatically run experiments on 30% of such games, resulting in insights into different forms of jumping and their associated feel.
Jumping has been an important mechanic since its introduction in Donkey Kong. It has taken a variety of forms and shown up in numerous games, with each jump having a different feel. In this paper, we use a modified Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) emulator to semi-automatically run experiments on a large subset (30%) of NES platform games. We use these experiments to build models of jumps from different developers, series, and games across the history of the console. We then examine these models to gain insights into different forms of jumping and their associated feel.