Project EMPAMOS

The project EMPAMOS is a research project of the Nuremberg Institute of Technology, which is carried out in cooperation with the German Games Archive of the City of Nuremberg.

What is the project about?

The aim of the project is to analyse board and board games with qualitative and quantitative research methods in order to discover the motivating game elements that creative game inventors combine in ever new variations. This is done in three steps:

[1]

In the first step, selected board games are played and examined with regard to the game elements used. These game elements are described as patterns based on the concept of a Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander.

[2]

In a second step, search engine technologies as well as machine learning methods are used to empirically investigate the relevance and frequency of the described patterns. To this end, the aim is to digitise and analyse as many game instructions as possible from the approximately 30,000 board games available at the German Games Archive.

[3]

In a third step, the patterns are combined on the basis of the empirical analysis results to form a pattern language, which then represents the DNA of motivating board game to a certain extent. In a follow-up project, these patterns will then be transferred to the gamification area.