This thesis investigates the relationship between object-oriented programming languages and game models of computation. These are intuitively well matched: an object encapsulates some internal state and presents some behaviour to the world via its publicly visible methods, while a strategy for some game represents the possible interactions of a program with its environment. We work with a simpl...

Language resources are hardly ever large enough. Building language resources that can be used as a gold standard for semantic analysis requires effort and investment. We present a prototype for acquiring language resources by means of a language game which is a cheap but long-term method. Games employed to acquire language resources are not new. For example games with a purpose are used for col...

Ghost is a popular word game played by two or more players. Players take turns adding a letter to the end of a growing word fragment, trying not to be the first to complete a valid word. We show that the game, when played on a regular language, is PSPACE-hard, and extend the result to four variants of the game. In addition, we take advantage of a quirk of the German language — that German words...

In this paper we present a game semantics for a quantum programming language based on a new definition of quantum strategies. The language studied is MCdata, a typed version of the measurement calculus recently introduced by Danos et. al. We give a soundness and adequacy result based on our quantum game semantics. The main contribution is not the semantics of MCdata but rather the development o...

The Game Description Language (GDL) has been developed for the purpose of formalizing game rules. It serves as the input language for general game players, which are systems that learn to play previously unknown games without human intervention. In this paper, we show that GDL can be readily used as a specification language for a large class of multiagent environments. The resulting specificati...

Educational video games, or teaching games, can help in language learning by increasing student motivation or by allowing contextualized learning. However, game development is a costly and complex activity with many open issues. In this paper we present a method that allows for rapid game prototyping, thus reducing the risks implied in development. The method is based on the reuse of common str...

How do we create knowledge? We use the language of side-choosing games to instruct humans about which knowledge needs to be created, i.e., which problem needs solving. The language of side-choosing games becomes the domain-specific language for the human computation system. Our: side-choosing game (SCG) language uses a programming language to express game states and their transitions. What is u...

Recently the general Game Description Language (GDL) has been extended so as to cover arbitrary games with incomplete/imperfect information. Learning—without human intervention—to play such games poses a reasoning challenge for general game-playing systems that is much more intricate than in case of complete information games. Action formalisms like the Situation Calculus have been developed fo...

There is considerable interest in the prospect of controlling computer games in natural language, as this would open the way to new gaming experiences. In this paper, we report results from a small, yet fully-implemented, prototype for natural language control based on a DOOMTM game emulator. The system, developed on top of a parser integrating syntactic and semantic processing, is able to anal...