The Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games

Project Information

LUDEME

Grant agreement ID: 771292

DOI

10.3030/771292

Project closed

EC signature date 14 March 2018

Start date 1 April 2018

End date 31 December 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 997 244,00

EU contribution

€ 1 997 244,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT MAASTRICHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - LUDEME (The Digital Ludeme Project: Modelling the Evolution of Traditional Games)

Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Digital Ludeme Project (DLP) bridged the gap between the historical and technical study of games studies, providing a new paradigm for interpreting the intangible cultural heritage of games using current machine learning techniques to yield a deeper understanding of the development of games throughout human history and help reconstruct how several ancient games may have been played. The reconstruction process provides evidence-based results that incorporate historical, cultural, geographic, functional and ludic aspects with explainable derivations.

The Ludii general game system set a new standard for General Game Playing (GGP) systems, being the only system capable of not only modelling the full range of 1,000 traditional games studied in this protect but also imputing missing rules based on historical and cultural evidence and evaluating them for quality. The database of historical evidence for the most important 1,000 traditional strategy games throughout human history accumulated during the project itself provides an unprecedented resource for games scolars worldwide.

The project demonstrated a new approach to interpolating intangible cultural heritage from the available (partial) tangible evidence using a Cultural Social Network (CSN) approach to quantise ephemeral historical/cultural knowledge with concrete geo-temporal markers and apply modern Social Network methods to build a picture of historical/cultural connections throughout history. This new paradigm for games research and achieved the project's aims of: 1) Modelling, 2) Reconstructing and 2) Mapping traditional strategy games throughout history based on the (partial) available evidence and constitutes a new field of study called Digital Archaeoludology (DAL), The Digital Ludeme Project provided greater insight into our understanding of games as cultural artefacts, and pioneered new tools and techniques for their continued analysis.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Work done during the project included:
• Developing the Ludii general game system.
• Identifying the 1,000 most important traditional strategy games.
• Populating the DLP Database with known evidence of these games.
• Mapping this data geographically/temporally using the GeaCron mapping service.
• Mapping this data culturally by developing the Cultural Solcial Network (CSN).
• Using these results to produce plausible reconstructions of ancient games with missing rules.

The Ludii Portal web site (http://ludii.games) provides access to all material collected and developed over the project, as well as interactive access to the full catalogue of games in the database and evidence for them. The Ludii system has developed a healthy community of users worldwide including games researchers, hobbyists and professional game designers who use it for modelling and play-testing prototypes for new board games.

The project produced around 50 technical publications (most peer reviewed) and several supplemental guides and reports for understanding the Ludii system and DLP Database. The project ran two international Symposia (attended by Advisory Panel members and other stakeholders) and ran several tutorials/workshops/paper sessions in major technical games research conferences. It enjoyed public interest from the start with coverage in local, national and international newspapers, web sites, podcasts, radio and television, in addition to several invited talks at local events as well as international venues for the PI and team members. It also inspired research projects for around 100 students supervised by the PI at the Host Institution, and continues to inspire new research projects supervised by team members in subsequent roles.

A key output of the project is its part in the major exhibition "A World of Games" at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg (Sweden). This exhibition runs for five years in Gothenburg then for a further 1.5 years at the Ethnography Museum in Stockholm, receiving around 150,000 visitors per year.

The main results of the project have been to develop and implement a new paradigm for games researchers that takes partial historical and cultural evidence about games and: 1) maps relationships between them in a new, functional way based on their underlying concepts, and 2) imputes missing information about them to produce concrete reconstructions for how they might have been played. This new paradigm for games research is now being taken forward by the follow-on GameTable COST action.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Ludii general game system, developed during the project for this task, set a new standard for General Game Playing (GGP) sThe principles pioneered by this project have been picked up and are now being carried forward by a large international network of games researchers. ystems, and is the state-of-the-art in this field in terms of generality, efficiency and scope. The Ludii program represents the first implementation of the Class Grammar approach — in which the program interprets its own code to produce a constantly adapting grammar — which allowed the full range of more than 1,000 games required for this project to be supported; something that no prior GGP system could have achieved.

Another innovation of the Ludii system is association with mathematical concepts with the “ludemes” that make up all games, allowing games to be viewed and compared from a new functional perspective based on their underlying concepts. This led to a new classification of board games based on function and well as historical context, which is being further explored in follow-up work.

The project also demonstrated a new approach to interpolating intangible cultural heritage from the available (partial) tangible evidence. The Cultural Social Network (CSN) developed during the DLP showed how to quantise ephemeral historical/cultural knowledge with concrete geo-temporal markers and use modern Social Network methods to build a picture of historical/cultural connections throughout human history. This approach, and the CSN itself, has wide potential application for any study that needs to frame hard empirical data in a cultural/historical context.

The link between the historical evidence for games contained in the DLP database, and the big picture of human cultural development provided by the CSN, was achieved through a novel mechanism made possible by project partner Geacron (based in Madrid). Geacron provide a geo-temporal mapping service with yearly political world maps for the last 5,000 years, allowing every piece of evidence in the DLP database to be mapped to a specific political entity (country/tribe/region) based on its GPS coordinate (or region) and date range. Geacron also provided data on adjacencies between political/cultural entities (indicating the likelihood that entities may have come into contact) based on political boundaries, geographical distance and known historical routes due to trade, exploration, conquest, missionaries, etc. These adjacencies form the basis of the Cultural Social Network (CSN) through the novel application of Social Network methods. The CSN approach pioneered for this project proved far more effective at modelling cultural relationships through time than the initially planned approach based on phylogenetic techniques.

The Digital Ludeme Project succeeded in establishing Digital Archaeoludology as a research field and achieved its overarching goal of bridging the gap between historical and technical games studies.

Topsy Turvy World - Satirical game-based artwork from ancient Egyptian