I’m intent on making a game that actually has fundamentally argument-related gameplay. So I looked into what AI researchers have done to try to codify debate. I was gratified to find that there is a branch of study that works towards this end.
Gasso, Floriana. 2004 “Towards a Framework for Rhetorical Argumentation.” Liverpool, England.
was very helpful. It’s written in symbolic logic-ese, but the idea is actually pretty intuitive. Crucially, arguments have to work in the context of facts and relationships the argument exists in, and it’s effective as far as it is acceptable to the audience.
Martin Caminada and Yining Wu. Towards an Argument Game for Stable Semantics. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Computational MoWork experiencedels of Natural Argument (CMNA 2008).
This convinced me that I might not be able to literally replicate argument mechanics in a game. The logic of a “stable semantics” argument game makes sense to me, but linking the symbols to actual real-world concepts is unclear. I think it would require too much abstraction.
G. A. W. Vreeswijk and H. Prakken, ‘Credulous and sceptical argument games for preferred semantics’, in Proceedings of the 7th European Workshop on Logic for Artificial Intelligence (JELIA-00), number 1919 in Springer Lecture Notes in AI, pp. 239–253, Berlin, (2000). Springer Verlag.
[Edit: All these papers’ PDFs are available via Google. But Google wasn’t letting me copy the URLs properly.]
Very cool representation of arguments, and this encouraged me to try to integrate all these concepts to make it work.
And I think I can…I think I have a really intuitive framework for this. Before I present that, here’s a WIP screenshot after all this bloviation.
Good luck everyone! We’re on track to finish with a really cool AGBIC 2012!
