1. Background/Motivation Abstract Tutorials Recording Acknowledgments Graph Games started as Pebble It, a game to solve one type of graph problem. The goal of Graph Games is to present casual and fun puzzle games based on NP-complete problems that are all graph problems. The previous years' work created a more extensible framework and added three new games. This year we added several new features including tutorials for new players and began recording more data from player solutions as well as further improving the Graph Games interface. Future Work Graph Games is a collection of games with the purpose of gathering data from player solutions for solving graph-related problems that are difficult for computers to solve efficiently. The data will be used to solve instances of and improve algorithms for various problems. New features we added this summer: Computer Science Department at Hope College Dean of Natural and Applied Sciences at Hope College National Science Foundation Graph Games Russell Zinn Hsiang Lin Dr. Charles Cusack Tutorials allow players to easily jump into Graph Games. Learning how to play quickly is important to keep players interested in these games. Now we can create and edit tutorials Every move has 3 stages, and each stage can be annotated These annotations come up in dialogs when playing tutorials We can delete the last move of the tutorial to change it, or move backwards through moves to change the annotations Various tutorial screens Player Studies: We want to investigate how well humans who have no specific knowledge or training in graph theory can do at solving graph-related problems by playing our games. Data Analysis: After we have gathered enough data, we will study players’ solutions to see what we can learn from how they play, and to potentially help improve the current best known algorithms Continual Software Development: We will continue to add more meaningful puzzles, as well as continue to improve the GUI to better attract and retain players Each move now stores the time that it was performed All graph moves players perform are now stored Now both players and researchers can watch player solutions at the same speed as the player solved the puzzle We created playable tutorials, and an extensive editor for the tutorials In addition to the game moves players perform we also began recording all graph moves players make instead of only the final placement of nodes, we also began recording the time of each event We can now watch solutions at the same speed as the player solved it This lets us, for instance, to find places in puzzles that players get stuck We now know how and when players move nodes around the graph This allows us to study how players interact with puzzles as they solve them Human Computing Games focus on applying the computational power of people to help solve problems that are difficult for computers. Casual, online games are perfect for this because games make it easy to keep players engaged. The problems we are trying to solve are called NP-Complete problems. More specifically, they are all graph problems. Motivation: We want to study everything players do to solve puzzles in order to determine whether or not people with no knowledge of these problems can actually help solve them We must attract and retain players to continually gather more information http://graph.computinggames.org For more information contact: Dr. Charles Cusack 233 VanderWerf Hall 27 Graves Place Holland, MI 49423 cusack@hope.edu Phone: (616) 395-7271 FAX: (616) 395-7123