Journal articles on the topic 'Tower Defense Game'

Game "My Monster Tower" adalah sebuah game bergenre tower defense. Game ini dibuat dengan menggunakan Unity dan ditargetkan untuk platform smartphone Android. Perancangan sprite pada game ini menggunakan Aseprite sebuah aplikasi untun membuat gambar. Pemain dapat memilih 8 stage yang disediakan. Setiap stage memiliki tingkat kesulitan yang berbeda. Game ini memberikan sudut pandang lain yaitu bermain sebagai monster yang berusaha bertahan hidup dari keserakahan manusia. Tujuan dari game “My Monster Tower” adalah menghancurkan tower lawan dengan menggunakan karakter yang ada sambil berusaha untuk melindungi agar tower pemain tidak dihancurkan. Kondisi kemenangan dalam game ini adalah disaat tower dari lawan atau tower dari pemain hancur, pemenang dalam game ini adalah pihak yang berhasil menghancurkan tower. Pengujian dilakukan dengan metode blackbox testing, alpha testing oleh dosen pembimbing, dan beta testing dengan melalui survei pada 40 responden. Hasil pengujian menunjukkan bahwa My Monster Tower merupakan game yang cukup menarik oleh banyak orang. Hal ini dikarenakan karena My Monster Tower memiliki banyak variasi monster yang dapat dimainkan dan dikumpulkan untuk melawan musuh pada setiap stage.

In today's society, with the rapid development of computer technology, personal computers have been integrated into our lives, and computer games have become a way of entertainment for people. Among them, tower defense games, as a branch of strategy games, have also been loved by the majority of players. On the computer game download platform, such as Steam's download list, you can also see all kinds of excellent tower defense games listed, such as “Bloom TD” and “Plants vs. Zombies”. However, in recent years, most tower defense games lack innovation, and the level game play is monotonous. Players are beginning to get tired of the gameplay of classic tower defense games, and their popularity has begun to decline. In order to solve this problem, this article is based on the Unity3D game engine, combined with the characteristics of UGC and RTS games, and made some innovations to the classic tower defense games. According to the actual needs, a tower defense game called “The Rise of The Tribes” was developed. The main work of this paper is to analyze and design The game, realize The switching between The three scenes in The game and each interface, and solve how to build buildings, how to defend defensive buildings, and how to deploy and move soldiers and attack, how to generate, collect and consume resources, completed The debugging and testing of The game, summarized the development process and made an outlook on how to improve the game.

Video game merupakan salah satu sarana hiburan yang sudah tidak asing lagi untuk semua orang dan sangat di gemari oleh banyak orang dari segala usia. Hal itu disebabkan video game dapat diakses tidak hanya melalui PC ataupun konsol, tetapi juga melalui ponsel pintar. 
 Seringkali game juga dimanfaatkan untuk menghilangkan stress karena game dianggap seru dan menyenangkan. Ada sebuah riset untuk mengetahui apakah sebuah game mampu untuk menghilangkan stress. Riset dilakukan dengan mewawancarai 1.000 gamer tentang pandangan mereka terhadap game. Hasilnya, periset menemukan bahwa 55 persen perserta riset bermain video game karena membantu mereka untuk menghilangkan stres.
 Video game juga memiliki banyak genre (tipe), salah satunya adalah strategy. Strategy game adalah sebuah video game yang hasil akhirnya ditentukan dari cara apa yang dipilih oleh pemain. Genre strategy ini memiliki beberapa sub-genre, salah satunya adalah Tower Defense. Berdasarkan penjelasan tersebut maka penulis memilih untuk merancang game Heroes Conquest. Game Heroes Conquest adalah game yang ber-genre Tower Defense. Pemain diharuskan untuk melindungi base atau markas dari musuh-musuh yang berjalan ke dalam base dengan cara mengeluarkan tower untuk menyerang musuh-musuh tersebut. Demi terwujudnya perancangan dan pembuatan game ini. Maka diperlukan juga engine game maker yang mumpuni. Unity3D dipilih sebagai engine game untuk membuat game Heroes Conquest karena unity3D merupaka game engine yang support multi-platform build dan juga mampu mebuat game baik 2D, 2.5D, 3D.

This game was designed using Unity Game Engine and is targeted to Android smartphone. Aseprite is used to design the sprite in this game. There are 8 stages in this game. Each stage has a different level of difficulty. The aim of this game is to destroy the opponent's tower while protecting the player's tower from being destroyed by the opponent’s. The win condition is when the opponent's tower has destroyed. Testing is done by blackbox testing, alpha testing by the supervisor, and beta testing through a survey of 40 respondents. The test results show that “Myth of Java” is a game that is quite interesting. This is because “Myth of Java” has several stages with different levels of difficulties. It also has a background story that takes from the mystical beliefs that exist in Java Island.

At the moment, agents cannot choose their own path with any flexibility in tower defense games. There may be a lot of enemies in one level of a tower defense game. The majority of in-game characters have a habit of moving in the direction of goals or objectives, though most have distinctive numbers and behaviors. The pathfinding method can be used to determine the route between the sources coordinates and the destination coordinates in an AI movement system. In this study, an objective-based pathfinding technique is used in a tower defense game where players can choose their own route. Based on the test results, the game can change the destination, which forces the adversary to alter their course to reach the new location. By placing units that can block these paths, this game also has the capacity to alter the available paths on the map.

Game Tower Defense adalah game strategi yang bertujuan untuk mencegah musuh melewati suatu wilayah atau area dengan menempatkan susunan tower seperti bangunan dan senjata. Game tower defence yang ada saat ini masih belum ada tindakan yang dilakukan musuh ketika terkena serangan atau damage dari tower dan belum adanya misi permainan pada game tersebut sehingga tidak memberikan pengalaman bermain yang memuaskan bagi pemain yang mencari tantangan. Game ini dirancang menggunakan game engine unity 2D dengan mengimplementasikan metode FSM (Finite State Machine) untuk pengambilan keputusan atau tindakan prilaku pada NPC (Non Player Character) karakter musuh atau Monster dengan menggunakan tiga hal yaitu State (Keadaan), Event (kejadian) dan action (aksi). Pengujian kecerdasan buatan yang diimplementasikan akan diuji dengan melakukan pengujian blackbox digunakan untuk mengamati hasil fungsional dari aplikasi dan mengamati apakah input dan output berjalan dengan baik. Dari pengujian yang telah dilakukan tersebut didapatkan hasil implementasi metode Finite State Machine pada NPC (Non Player Character) Monster atau enemy sudah bisa menujukkan prilaku cerdas berjalan dengan baik. Dari pengujian 18 orang responden, didapatkan hasil yang menunjukkan bahwa 25% (total 49) menyatakan sangat setuju, 70% (total 138) menyatakan setuju, dan 5% (total 11) menyatakan tidak setuju.

RTS Game is one of the popular genre in PC gaming, which has been played by various type of players frequently. In RTS game, NPC Defense Building (Tower) has attacking behavior to the closest enemy without considering certain enemy parameters. This causes the NPC Tower to be more predictable by the opponent and easily defeated if NPC attacked by enemies in the group. Thus, this research simulates NPC Tower using Hierarchical Finite State Machine (HFSM) method compared with Finite State Machine (FSM). In this study, NPC Tower detects enemies by seeing at four parameters namely NPC Tower Health, Enemy's Health, Enemy Type, and Tower Distance to enemies. NPC Tower will attack the most dangerous enemy according to the ‘Degree of Danger’ parameter. Then use the decision-making logic of the rule-based system. The output of NPC Tower are three type of behaviors namely Aggressive Attacking, Regular Attacking, and Attack with Special Skill. From the test results of 3 NPC Tower, Kamandaka NPC Tower with HFSM method is winning 8.92% compare to Kamandaka Tower with FSM method. For Gayatri Tower NPC obtained equal results using both HFSM and FSM. Meanwhile, Adikara NPC with HFSM method is 4.62% superior to Adikara Tower with FSM method.

Game merupakan salah satu sarana hiburan yang dapat digunakan untuk mengisi waktu luang. Saat ini, game sudah banyak berkembang sehingga memiliki desain yang lebih menarik, gameplay yang lebih bervariasi, kualitas suara yang lebih baik, serta tersedia di banyak platform. Selain tersedia di banyak platform, game juga dibagi menjadi beberapa jenis yaitu 2D, 3D, Augmented Reality, dan Virtual Reality. Game berjenis 3D merupakan game yang sangat banyak diminati di kalangan gamers karena kualitas grafis yang baik serta gameplay yang lebih bervariasi. Namun, game berjenis 2D juga tidak kalah menarik jika menggunakan asset yang berkualitas dan gameplay yang unik sehingga muncul sebuah ide untuk membuat tower defense strategy game berjudul “Frontier of Hell”. Frontier of Hell merupakan sebuah game tower defense dua dimensi yang dirancang khusus untuk perangkat komputer dan mobile. Permainan ini dibuat menggunakan Godot Game Engine yang merupakan platform game engine yang gratis dan bersifat open source. Godot dapat digunakan untuk membuat game berbasis 2D maupun 3D yang dapat berjalan di berbagai platform seperti Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, website, dan lain-lain. Dalam permainan “Frontier of Hell”, pemain diharuskan untuk melindungi base dari serangan musuh di setiap stage. Untuk melindungi base dari serangan musuh, pemain dapat membangun dan meningkatkan tower yang akan menyerang musuh yang berjalan menuju base.

<span>RTS Game is one of the popular genre in PC gaming, which has been played by various type of players frequently. In RTS game, NPC Defense Building (Tower) has attacking behavior to the closest enemy without considering certain enemy parameters. This causes the NPC Tower to be more predictable by the opponent and easily defeated if NPC attacked by enemies in the group. Thus, this research simulates NPC Tower using Hierarchical Finite State Machine (HFSM) method compared with Finite State Machine (FSM). In this study, NPC Tower detects enemies by seeing at four parameters namely NPC Tower Health, Enemy's Health, Enemy Type, and Tower Distance to enemies. NPC Tower will attack the most dangerous enemy according to the ‘Degree of Danger’ parameter. Then use the decision-making logic of the rule-based system. The output of NPC Tower are three type of behaviors namely Aggressive Attacking, Regular Attacking, and Attack with Special Skill. From the test results of 3 NPC Tower, Kamandaka NPC Tower with HFSM method is winning 8.92% compare to Kamandaka Tower with FSM method. For Gayatri Tower NPC obtained equal results using both HFSM and FSM. Meanwhile, Adikara NPC with HFSM method is 4.62% superior to Adikara Tower with FSM method.</span>

Game is an activity that cannot be separated from human life because human beings are playing. The growth of digital game on a smartphone rapidly and widely available in the available online which is a service provider of digital applications and games. The existence of digital games on smartphones is an application shall be owned by user that is used as a partnership be, a pastime, and as medium of education. Educational activities are learning activities and receive information on a person directly or indirectly. The information provided on recipient's are knowledge or limited a short message. Tower defense game is one kind of games that can be used as education to the recipient. With structure analysis method, elements of education on tower defense games will be analyzed to be known by both the educational element.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, scientists and public health organizations such as the CDC and the WHO promoted health guidelines to the public. However, social media misinformation, social stigma, and a drastic change in lifestyle lead to reduced compliance or non-compliance with these measures. As a result, playful public health messaging emerged as an attempt to increase health literacy around Covid-19 preventative practices, one of which was the tower defense game, Vaccine Nation. This article outlines the design principles of Cognitive Behavioral Game Design (CBGD) and how they were used to design the tower-defense game Vaccine Nation, incorporating recommended health interventions including isolating, hand hygiene, social distancing, wearing masks, and eventually getting vaccinated.

Game merupakan permainan berbasis multimedia pada alat elektronik yang memberikan hiburan kepada yang memainkannya. Seiring dengan perkembangan teknologi, fungsi game tidak hanya dijadikan sebagai sarana hiburan saja, namun game telah menjadi luas fungsinya. Misalnya, sebagai sarana pembelajaran atau pengenalan sebuah budaya tertentu yang dikemas secara unik dan menarik. Mitologi adalah ilmu mengenai bentuk sastra yang mengandung konsepsi dan dongeng suci tentang kehidupan dewa dan makhluk halus dalam suatu kebudayaan. Di Indonesia khususnya di Bali sendiri cerita-cerita serta keberadaan makhluk-makhluk mitologi masih sangat dihormati di kalangan masyarakat. Salah satu cerita mitologi yang menarik adalah kisah Samudramanthana. Cerita Samudramanthana masih berbentuk teks saja namun dengan diadaptasi ke dalam bentuk multimedia yaitu game maka diharapkan cerita akan menjadi menarik dan lebih mudah dipahami terutama bagi generasi muda. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk merancang dan membangun game cerita mitologi tentang kisah Samudramanthana disertai dengan informasi mengenai tokoh-tokoh mitologi Bali yang dikemas dengan menarik. Penelitian ini mengunakan metode (MDLC), dijalankan pada android dengan menggunakan software Unity 3D, Berdasarkan rancang bangun yang sudah dilakukan, diperoleh kesimpulan yaitu hasil pengujian Heuristic Evaluation didapat bahwa seluruh tombol sudah berjalan sesuai dengan yang dirancang pada Game Tower Defense Sebagai Media Pengenalan Berbasis Android

Game "Space Mayhem" adalah game dengan genre Tower Defense Action yang menggunakan fitur Augmented Reality. Game ini dirancang dengan menggunakan Game Engine Unity3D dan ekstensi Vuforia SDK untuk fitur Augmented Reality-nya. Pemain harus melindungi stasiun luar angkasa dari serangan musuh dengan cara menghancurkan musuh menggunakkan kapal pemain yang akan otomatis menembak jika terdapat musuh di dalam jarak serangnya.

Tower Defense is a game genre that uses a pathfinding algorithm. Pathfinding is a way to find a path from one point to another; pathfinding itself has many variants with different scenarios. One of these algorithms is the A-Star algorithm, a well- known and commonly used method for game pathfinding. Another algorithm is the Flow Field algorithm, which is an algorithm that is not widely known and has become the topic in this following research. This research will be carried out by comparing the time required by both algorithms to reach the target point from starting point, and time comparison will be carried out in 3 different scenarios. The result of the research is that the Flow Field algorithm reaches the target faster than A-Star Pathfinding in every scenario carried out in the simulation. This research concludes that the Flow Field algorithm can compete with the A-Star algorithm to find paths in the Tower Defense game.

Gaming industry and game development are quickly growing. However, learning game development is often a challenge for Computer Science (CS) students. In this paper, we introduce a student project for designing and developing a game prototype with details. In the project we combine a few essential game features by implementing multiple play modes, NPCs, and randomness and varieties. We especially introduce the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in simulating the behaviors of intelligent agents, which we believe can be beneficial to the understanding of AI applications in gaming. In addition, the design ideas and implementation details can be helpful to the design of student game projects in CS teaching and may also inspire the development of other games.

City Protector is an Arcade Tower Defense Game with endless element. This game implements touch gesture recognizer feature. This game is developed with Unity game engine and playable in Android-based smartphone. To kill zombies, players must draw the symbols contained in the explosives that brought by zombies. Testing is done by blackbox testing, alpha testing, and beta testing through a survey of 32 respondents. The results indicate that City Protector has interesting features and gameplay concepts. It is provides new experiences because the Touch Gesture Recognizer feature is rarely found in general.

Sistem pencernaan pada manusia merupakan salah satu sistem yang dipelajari dalam pelajaran sekolah mulai dari tingkat SD sampai dengan SMA. Dalam sistem yang dikembangkan ini dipelajari bagaimana makanan yang dimakan akan dipecah dengan menggunakan enzim di dalam tubuh. Game dalam dalam penelitian ini akan mensimulasikan bagaimana makan masuk ke dalam tubuh, kemudian dicerna dalam sistem pencernaan manusia sampai menjadi feses. Game ini berbentuk 2D tower defense bertemakan makanan, gizi dan enzim dimana pengguna harus menentukan strategi yang efektif agar gizi pada makanan tercerna dan terserap dengan baik. Dengan adanya game ini, terlihat gambaran bagaimana makanan dicerna oleh tubuh.

To distinguish each level, tower defense games require map design, enemy travel routes, and enemy wave designs. Manually designed designs require a lot of effort and time. To overcome this problem, procedural content generation is used to create maps automatically. Not all content can be created automatically, the content designed in this research includes portal design, tower design, enemy design, and tile design. The Map is created automatically using Perlin Noise to determine the type of tiles on the map. To produce a playable map in accordance with the minimum distance requirement of 45 tiles, the position of the player portal and enemy portal need to be checked using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm. The test results show that after 100 attempts, 25 trials need to be repeated because the distance between the portals does not meet the requirements. The average map creation time is 0.99 seconds. The enemy waves on each map also vary from the number of each type and the order in which the enemies come out.

Untuk meningkatkan pikiran secara kreatif diperlukan berbagai terobosan, baik dalam pengembangan kegiatan sehari-hari, motivasi belajar,dan pemenuhan sarana serta prasarana pendidikan.Dengan Memanfaatkan kemajuan teknologi informasi dan komunikasi khususnya teknologi komputer dalam kegiatan sehari-hari di sekolah atau di lingkungan rumah diharapkan dapat mengembangkan pola pikir, kreativitas para siswa dan dapat memberikan hiburan terhadap siswa. Penulis membuat sebuah Game Interaktif untuk mendorong siswa agar dapat berpikir secara kreatif dan memberikan hiburan kepada siswa. Oleh karena itu, penulis melakukan pengembangan sebuah Game yang menggabungkan, Object 3D yang dibuat dengan software Blender, lalu teks, gambar lalu suara dapat diproses dengan aplikasi Unity Game Engine. Hasil akhir dari penulisan laporan ini berupa Game strategy creative genre “Tower Defense” tentang menjaga serangan dari virus. Hasil nya adalah sebuah game operasional yang membantu meningkatkan kreativitas pemain. Sebagai tambahan penulis membuat stationary berupa Sticker dan Poster untuk tempat riset

Although scholars of video game enjoyment propose that games are meant to present a reasonable and appropriate challenge to players, not enough research has tested the effects of difficulty on enjoyment or the psychological mechanisms driving this relationship. In an experimental study involving college students (N = 121) playing a casual online tower defense game, we tested the relationship between difficulty and enjoyment and the possible mediating roles played by competency, as specified by self-determination theory, and challenge-skill balance, as specified by flow theory. Path analysis suggested that feelings of competency contribute to enjoyment by helping players obtain a balance between challenge and skill, and that competency is enhanced when players are assigned an easier game mode. This paper then addresses implications for theory, game design, and laboratory studies.

This paper proposes a new educational strategy tower of defensive warfare entertainment machine which relies on linkage institutions, introduces two sets of role and combines with strategic defense warfare game ideology. Based on the virtual prototype of modeling which is made by SolidWorks and 3DMAX and a dynamics analysis on hitting force and friction of the opposition role in the attack on track and recycling process, it explains the feasibility of manufacture of the new entertainment machine.

The video game industry is becoming increasingly important due to its revenues and growing capabilities. User eXperience (UX) is an important factor which contributes to the acceptance of a video game. The UX is usually assessed at the end of the development process, and for this reason it is difficult to ensure an adequate level of interactive experience between computer game and players. Cancelation of projects or even bankruptcy of a company can be caused by bad management of UX. In this paper, we propose the game experience management (GEM), a method to evaluate, manage, measure and track the UX from early stages of computer game development. In order to compare the proposal against a method comprised by conventional approaches, teams of master degree students were formed for developing six tower defense games for teaching basic multiplication operations; surveys were conducted to compare the UX of games. In this setting, we find that games developed with GEM significantly improve UX by increasing the puppetry and consequently reducing player frustration.

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar o jogo SAD Defense, do gênero Tower Defense, desenvolvido por equipe do Laboratório de Poéticas Fronteiriças (CNPq/UEMG - http://labfront.tk) para a quinta edição do Congresso Internacional de Arte, Ciência e Tecnologia: Seminário de Artes Digitais, edição de 2019. Através da pesquisa para o desenvolvimento do jogo, abordando o seu game design, apresentamos a jogabilidade e os elementos gráficos do advergame que remetem ao tema do evento em questão, ou seja, a “projeções e memória da arte”, bem como às edições anteriores. Desse modo, além de apresentar o campo de estudos dos mobile games, advergames e dos serious games, este artigo vai além da apresentação e discussão sobre um produto promocional, uma vez que propõe entendê-lo como um recurso que reforça a memória desse evento acadêmico.

Game merupakan aktivitas atau olahraga yang biasanya membutuhkan kemampuan, pengetahuan, atau faktor keberuntungan. Dalam permainan, Anda mengikuti aturan yang sudah ditentukan dan berusaha untuk memenangkan lawan atau menyelesaikan teka-teki. Pengembang video game, juga dikenal sebagai pengembang game, bertanggung jawab untuk merancang dan mengembangkan video game untuk aplikasi PC, konsol, dan seluler. Game Developer membantu mengubah persepsi game menjadi kenyata an yang dapat dimainkan. Mereka menciptakan fitur yang membuat video game dapat digunakan oleh pengguna. Kebutuhan akan Industri Game di Indonesia mengalami peningkatan dalam beberapa tahun belakangan ini. Namun sebaliknya berdasarkan data dari gabungan KOMINFO, LIPI, dan AGI (Asiosasi Game Indonesia) kekuatan pasar masih di pengaruhi pihak luar, dimana developer lokal hanya bisa menguasi sekitar 0,4 % nya saja. "Setelah melalui diskusi dengan SMK N 8 Pekanbaru, mereka membutuhkan bantuan dalam hal dasar-dasar pembuatan game. Melalui pengabdian ini, kami akan memberikan pelatihan/workshop kepada siswa untuk membekali mereka dengan keahlian dalam pembuatan game menggunakan Construct 3. Masalah Prioritas Pemenuhan Kebutuhan para Game Developer di Indonesia untuk bisa menguasai pasar di Negeri Sendiri Perlunya peningkatan Skill Anak Sekolah Menengah Kejuruan dengan salah satunya handal dalam pembuatan Game. Solusi Memberikan Pelatihan Dasar Mengenai Dasar-Dasar Pembuatan Game kepada Siswa Menengah Kejuruan. Workshop Pelatihan Game Construct 3.IPTEK Tahapan pembuatan Game 1.Lakukan Riset & Konseptualisasi Game Anda 2.Membuat Dokumen Desain 3.Menentukan Software 4.Memulai Pemrograman 5.Pengujian Game 6. Pemasaran Game Dan Iptek yang diberikan berikutnya 1.Membuat game Balloon Shooter 2.Membuat game Space Shooter3. Membuat game Tower Defense.

Game online merupakan media hiburan yang diminati oleh berbagai kalangan, dengan genre yang beragam beberapa diantaranya ada Role Playing Game (RPG), Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA), Turn Base Game, First Person Shooter (FPS), dan Tower Defense. Blue Archive sendiri merupakan sebuah game dengan tema RPG yang populer dikalangan gamer RPG Indonesia yang dikembangkan oleh perusahaan Nexon Games dan dirilis pada tahun 2021. Terlepas dari banyaknya pemain serta popularitasnya, game ini tidak terlepas dari adanya konotasi buruk bagi para pemainnya. Pasalnya banyak yang mencap pemain game ini sebagai pedofilia. Hal ini disebabkan karena setting game ini berlatar tempat di sebuah kota yang bernama Kivotos, yang mana kota ini dihuni oleh anak-anak sekolah, dimulai dari taman kanak-kanak, sekolah dasar, sekolah menengah pertama, hingga sekolah menengah atas. Selain itu banyak dari komentar pemainnya yang menuju ke arah hal yang vulgar pada setiap gambar yang berkaitan dengan karakter game ini. Dan juga banyak jokes atau candaan di komunitas game ini sendiri yang sering merujuk pada hal sensual terhadap anak dibawah umur yang membuat para pemain game ini di cap sebagai Pedofilia. Tujuan dari dibuatkannya Penelitian ini adalah untuk menganalisis isu kecenderungan pedofilia di kalangan pemain Blue Archive berdasarkan komentar mereka di Facebook menggunakan metode Naive Bayes. Penelitian ini melibatkan 3097 data komentar yang telah melewati tahap preprocessing seperti cleaning, labeling, case folding, tokenizing, filtering, dan stemming. Hasil analisis sentimen menunjukkan bahwa isu pedofilia di kalangan pemain game Blue Archive tergolong negatif dengan akurasi 76%, precision 50%, dan recall 52% dan f1-score 53%.

We explore fully autonomous companion characters within the context of Real Time Strategy games. Non-player Characters that are controlled by Artificial Intelligence to some degree, have been a feature of Role Playing games for decades. But RTS games rarely have a player avatar, and thus no real companions. The universe of RTS games where both an avatar and a companion character exist is small. Most friendly RTS units are semi-autonomous at best, requiring player micromanagement of their behavior. We present MimicA, a real-time framework to govern AI companion behavior by modeling that of the current player. Built for the Unity engine, MimicA is a learn-by-demonstration framework that differs from existing practices in that the behavior is fully autonomous, does not rely on previous modeling exercises and is designed to be generalized and extensible. We analyze and discuss MimicA through a thirty person user study with our own demonstration game, Lord of Towers. We find that 22 out of 30 participants (73%) indicate they enjoyed the game, and this self-reported enjoyment was on par with “traditional tower defense games”. 63% agree that MimicA controlled NPCs are doing what the player would do while 20% disagree. Similarly, 53% realize the NPCs are learning from the player while 20% do not. We also show that NPC with underlying Decision Tree and Naive Bayes algorithms are better than KNN in making the player realize the learning nature of the NPC.

Tower Defence the Rise of Majapahit Kingdom adalah aplikasi yang membantu pengguna mempelajari memanah dengan akurasi yang tepat menggunakan Virtual Reality sehingga akan lebih imersif dan meningkatkan pengalaman pengunjung, serta menawarkan Edutainment interaktif yang memungkinkan pengunjung untuk bermain, belajar, dan bersenang-senang secara simultan. Virtual Reality adalah teknologi komputer yang menciptakan lingkungan maya yang memungkinkan pengguna untuk berinteraksi dan merasa seolah-olah berada di dalamnya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengevaluasi permainan VR "Tower Defence the Rise of Majapahit Kingdom" yang berfokus pada tema sejarah Majapahit, khususnya dalam konteks memanah. Virtual Reality memiliki aspek penting yang terkait dengan pengalaman pengguna dan perlu diukur. Pengukuran pengalaman pengguna sangat penting karena dapat mempengaruhi kesuksesan aplikasi. Aspek usability adalah bagian penting dari pengalaman pengguna yang menentukan kapasitas aplikasi untuk menyelesaikan tugas dengan cara yang efisien dan memuaskan pengguna. Karenanya aplikasi VR harus diuji untuk memastikan pengalaman pengguna yang baik dan efektif. User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) digunakan untuk menguji kemampuan. Berbentuk kuesioner yang terdiri dari 26 pertanyaan yang dinilai berdasarkan skala nilai dari 1 hingga 7. Metode ini membuktikan kualitas aplikasi VR Tower Defence the Rise of Majapahit Kingdom memiliki kualitas yang cukup bagus. Lima elemen menerima skor di atas rata-rata, sedangkan satu elemen berada di bawah rata-rata. Ini disebabkan oleh fakta bahwa aplikasi masih memiliki beberapa kekurangan.

Spatiotemporal reasoning is a fundamental contributor to effective problem solving. In an effort to design better problem-solving agents, we examined and evaluated the strategies that humans use to solve Tower Defense puzzles, a complex and popular class of real-time strategy games. A consistent and unexpected finding was that humans frequently treated time and space as equivalent. Players stated temporal goals but solved spatial problems. An analysis of human data and computer simulations showed that re-representing temporal problems as spatial problems was beneficial, but treating the two separately can lead to higher scores. The work presented here holds several possibilities for level designers and others who design and analyze maps and spatial arrangements for domains requiring strategic reasoning.

Game saat ini merupakan salah satu bagian yang mengisi keseharian dalam kehidupan manusia. Manfaat game tidak lagi hanya dijadikan sebagai sarana hiburan semata. Hampir semua orang dari berbagai kalangan dan umur pernah memainkan game. Game saat ini tidak hanya sabagai sarana hiburan tetapi telah berkembang menjadi sarana pembelajaran, lahan bisnis dan bahkan dipertandingkan sebagai salah satu dari cabang olahraga elektronik (e-sport) oleh para profesional. Genre game yang banyak dimainkan pada perangkat mobile salah satunya adalah game bergenre strategi. Game bergenre strategi ini banyak diminati oleh para pemain dikarenakan selain untuk sarana hiburan, game strategi lebih memacu keahlian berpikir dari pemainnya agar dapat menyelesaikan permainan. Game Tower Defense sendiri merupakan permainan strategi untuk mengatur penempatan tower yang bertujuan untuk menghentikan musuh yang akan melintas. Game Tower Defense ‘Defense of Dewata Island’ merupakan game yang dibangun berbasis dua dimensi dimana karakter dan cerita yang digunakan diadaptasi dari Budaya Bali. Game ini dibangun menggunakan platform Android. Berdasarkan hasil pengujian dari aspek pengalaman user, grafis game, rekayasa perangkat lunak, entertainment dan content memiliki tingkat kelayakan rata-rata mencapai 85%, sehingga game Tower Defense ‘Defense of Dewata Island’ dapat diterima dan digunakan oleh masyarakat sebagai media hiburan dan pembelajaran untuk sejarah Bali.

In this paper, we propose a new style of tower defense game by using the circular placement of the tower. In this game, dubbed Orbital Defense X, the player must protect the earth with a circle of defensive tower circled around it. The game is developed using game development lifecycle from initiation phase through alpha version. To test the quality of the developed game, we measure the game experience using game experience questionnaire. The questionnaire is divided into three: core, social presence, and post-game questionnaire. The results show that male participant gains a significantly higher score than female participants. Overall, the game experience is received better by the male participant in the core and social presence components, with an average score of 2,27 vs 1,92 and 2,15 vs 1,86. However, in post-game experience, the female participant scores higher with 2,15 vs 1,95. The participant that previously played another tower defense game gave score more in the core, social presence, and post-game experience than the participant that haven’t played it before. Their score is 1,93 vs 2,37 in core, 1,67 vs 2,39 in social presence, and 2,07 vs 1,91 in post-game experience. The result also suggests for more attention in the challenge regarding the enemies (variety and difficulty) rather than more complex tower management system. The social ranking also suggested by the participant to improve the overall experience of this game.

The paper conducts an analysis of issues related to level creation in Tower Defense games. It examines the relevance and significance of the topic in the modern gaming industry. An analysis of recent scientific publications and research has highlighted key problems with existing level creation methods. Specifically, it identifies issues such as uniformity, significant time consumption in manual creation, inefficiency in handling large workloads, and errors in level generation. In order to address these problems and improve the level creation process, the paper proposes the use of procedural generation methods based on Perlin Noise. The analysis indicates that employing such methods can offer greater diversity and enhance gameplay quality in Tower Defense games. The research results demonstrate that the developed procedural level generation algorithm, in conjunction with pathfinding algorithms and the use of artificial intelligence to control adversaries, can enhance the quality of Tower Defense games. Employing these methods ensures variability, interest, and complexity in gameplay, impacting player satisfaction. The algorithm employs various parameters such as tower placement, enemy pathing, and resource distribution to ensure a balance between complexity and player satisfaction. Overall, research in the field of Tower Defense level creation underscores the importance of player collaboration and the use of innovative methods, such as genetic algorithms, to create an engaging and diverse gaming experience. Further research could focus on refining level generation algorithms and employing intelligent systems to automate this process, contributing to the improvement of quality and player satisfaction in Tower Defense games.

“DefKnights” is a three-dimensional game that can be accessed using internet browser with the address https://galeri.fti.untar.ac.id/gamedevuntar/defknights/. This game was developed with Unity Game Engine. The player will build towers to defeat enemies. Testing methods was done by Blackbox testing, Alpha testing, and Beta Testing by survey form given to 30 respondents. Testing results show that “DefKnights” is an interesting game with an easy-to-understand gameplay.

A qualitative research study is presented herein with the purpose of identifying mathematics learning opportunities in a commercial version of a Tower Defense game. These learning opportunities are understood as mathematicisable moments of the game and involve the establishment of relationships between the game and mathematical problem solving. Based on the analysis of the nature of these mathematicisable moments, we present several design options that are being implemented in a didactic version of a Tower Defense game.

Tower Defense is a game genre that uses a pathfinding algorithm. Pathfinding is a way to find a path from one point to another; pathfinding itself has many variants with different scenarios. One of these algorithms is the A-Star algorithm, a well- known and commonly used method for game pathfinding. Another algorithm is the Flow Field algorithm, which is an algorithm that is not widely known and has become the topic in this following research. This research will be carried out by comparing the time required by both algorithms to reach the target point from starting point, and time comparison will be carried out in 3 different scenarios. The result of the research is that the Flow Field algorithm reaches the target faster than A-Star Pathfinding in every scenario carried out in the simulation. This research concludes that the Flow Field algorithm can compete with the A-Star algorithm to find paths in the Tower Defense game.

We present Drug Defense, a mobile tower defense game designed to prevent alcohol abuse. The game makes use of the Cognitive Behavioral Game Design (CBGD) methodology to encourage the retention of knowledge about the consequences of excessive alcohol use. The researchers compared used pretest and posttest to determine the game aided in greater retention. The researchers also assessed the playability of the game was also evaluated using a questionnaire adapted from the Heuristics to Evaluate the Playability (HEP) of Games. Data analysis showed that the players had significantly increased knowledge on alcohol and its use. Players also enjoyed the game’s narrative and the need to strategize.

Games are a great source of entertainment and are used by people of all ages; they motivate and engage people and affect their behavior. Therefore, games have been widely studied in many non‑game contexts. Education is one of those areas where gamified, and game‑based learning strategies have been implemented and explored. To engage and motivate students to quiz each other, and as a side effect, build a question bank, as well as to study the gaming and learning behavior of students, we used a peer‑quizzing game called "Tower of Questions" (ToQ). The game uses some themes and mechanics found in tower defense (TD) games. The students received points for posing and answering the questions in the game in the form of gems. Students played the game with pseudonyms for one academic term and were told not to disclose their identities to anyone. We conducted a 3‑month long study for two consecutive years in the same first‑year undergraduate computer science course. In this paper, we present the findings from our studies using ToQ, specifically findings related to the students’ self‑monitoring and quizzing activities based on the game logs and two self‑reported surveys from data collected in the second year of the study.

AbstractThis study analyzes the effect of using a virtual reality (VR) game as a complementary tool to improve users’ rhythmic performance and perception in a remote and self-learning environment. In recent years, remote learning has gained importance due to various everyday situations; however, the effects of using VR in such situations for individual and self-learning have yet to be evaluated. In music education, learning processes are usually heavily dependent on face-to-face communication with a teacher and are based on a formal or informal curriculum. The aim of this study is to investigate the potential of gamified VR learning and its influence on users’ rhythmic sensory and perceptual abilities. We developed a drum-playing game based on a tower defense scenario designed to improve four aspects of rhythmic perceptual skills in elementary school children with various levels of music learning experience. In this study, 14 elementary school children received Meta Quest 2 headsets for individual use in a 14-day individual training session. The results showed a significant increase in their rhythmical skills through an analysis of their rhythmic performance before and after the training sessions. In addition, the experience of playing the VR game and using the HMD setup was also assessed, highlighting some of the challenges of currently available affordable headsets for gamified learning scenarios.

This research is based on intelligent strategy game known as Tower Defence in which players have to make strategic decisions to defend their tower from their enemies. This an interesting game where people can test their wits. In this game the players can build and upgrade their tower to prevent higher damage from enemies. This game requires quick strategic decisions and is fun to play. There are wide array of weapons/equipments that the player can access by using earning points. This game is developed by using Unity platform using C#. This game is easy and understandable as compare to other tower defence games available in market and can be played by players of all age. This intelligent strategy game is highly competitive and will help sharpen your brain too.

AbstractThis paper presents a novel exploration of the use of an evolving neural network approach to generate dynamic content for video games, specifically for a tower defence game. The objective is to employ the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) technique to train a NEAT neural network as a wave manager to generate enemy waves that challenge the player’s defences. The approach is extended to incorporate NEAT-generated curriculums for tower deployments to gradually increase the difficulty for the generated enemy waves, allowing the neural network to learn incrementally. The approach dynamically adapts to changes in the player’s skill level, providing a more personalised and engaging gaming experience. The quality of the machine-generated waves is evaluated through a blind A/B test with the Games Experience Questionnaire (GEQ), and results are compared with manually designed human waves. The study finds no discernible difference in the reported player experience between AI and human-designed waves. The approach can significantly reduce the time and resources required to design game content while maintaining the quality of the player experience. The approach has the potential to be applied to a range of video game genres and within the design and development process, providing a more personalised and engaging gaming experience for players.

This paper analyzes the revenue models of the most popular games of the Tower Defense genre on Google Play. A special look is taken at the quantitative distribution of the app sale model and the free model in terms of quality and download numbers. Additionally, this paper considers the qualitative implementation of the “free” model in the most popular games. First, the usual revenue models of mobile apps will be discussed and then the Tower Defense genre will be explained. Following that, the quantitative distribution of revenue models and an analysis of the most popular apps’ respective revenue models will be addressed. The analysis also identifies and explains two modifications of established revenue models. The most popular revenue model for mobile apps in the Tower Defense genre are in-app purchases. This distinguishes the genre from many other genres and games. A wide range of Tower Defense games utilizes the revenue models app sale and free. It becomes apparent that revenue models for mobile apps must be analyzed and considered specifically for their respective sector, and that no single promising revenue model for apps exists.

Introduction Amidst ecological collapse and environmental catastrophe, humankind is surrounded by indications that our habitat is turning against us in monstrous ways. The very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games. Such cultural manifestations of planetary catastrophe are particularly evident in video game monsters. These virtual figures continue monsters’ long-held role in reflecting the socio-cultural anxieties of their particular era. The horrific figures that monsters present play a culturally reflexive role, echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context. Media monsters closely reflect their surrounding cultural conditions (Cohen 47), representing “a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself” (Hutchings 37). Society’s deepest anxieties culminate in these figures in forms that are “threatening and impure” (Carroll 28), “unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory” (Kearney 4–5), and abject (Kristeva 4). In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change. Horrors from the Anthropocene A growing climate emergency surrounds us, enveloping us in the abject and aberrant conditions of what could be described as an ecological monstrosity. Monstrous threats to our environment and human survival are experienced on a planetary scale and research evidence plainly illustrates a compounding catastrophe. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a relatively cautious and conservative body (Parenti 5), reports that a human-made emergency has developed since the Industrial Revolution. The multitude of crises that confront us include: changes in the Earth’s atmosphere driving up global temperatures, ice sheets in retreat, sea levels rising, natural ecosystems and species in collapse, and an unprecedented frequency and magnitude of heatwaves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires (United Nations Environment Programme). Further human activity, including a post-war addiction to the plastics that have now spread their way across our oceans like a “liquid smog” (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 258), or short-sighted enthusiasm for pesticides, radiation energy, and industrial chemicals (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 254), has ensured a damaging shift in the nature of the feedback loops that Earth’s ecosystems depend upon for stability (Parenti 6). Climatic equilibrium has been disrupted, and growing damage to the ecosystems that sustain human life suggests an inexorable, entropic path to decay. To understand Earth’s profound crisis requires thinking beyond just climate and to witness the interconnected “extraordinary burdens” placed on our planet by “toxic chemistry, mining, nuclear pollution, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people” which will continue to lead to the recursive collapse of interlinked major systems (Haraway 100). To speak of climate change is really to speak of the ruin of ecologies, those “living systems composed of many moving parts” that make up the tapestry of organic life on Earth (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 251). The emergency that presents itself, as Renata Tyszczuk observes, comprises a pervasiveness, uncertainty, and interdependency that together “affect every aspect of human lives, politics and culture” (47). The emergence of the term Anthropocene (or the Age of the Humans) to describe our current geological epoch (and to supersede the erstwhile and more stable Holocene) (Zalasiewicz et al. 1036–7; Chang 7) reflects a contemporary impossibility with talking about planet Earth without acknowledging the damaging impact of humankind on its ecosystems (Bulfin 142). This recognition of human complicity in the existential crisis engulfing our planet once again connects ecological monstrosity to the socio-cultural history of the monstrous. Monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out, “are our children” and despite our repressive efforts, “always return” in order to “ask us why we have created them” (20). Ecological monstrosity declares to us that our relegation of greenhouse gases, rising sea levels, toxic waste, species extinction, and much more, to the discursive periphery has only been temporary. Monsters, when examined closely, start to look a lot like ourselves in terms of biological origins (Perron 357), as well as other abject cultural and social markers that signal these horrific figures as residing “too close to the borders of our [own] subjectivity for comfort” (Spittle 314). Isabel Pinedo sees this uncanny nature of the horror genre’s antagonists as a postmodern condition, a ghoulish reminder of the era’s breakdown of categories, blurring of boundaries, and collapse of master narratives that combine to ensure “mastery is lost … and the stable, unified, coherent self acquires the status of a fiction” (17–18). In standing in for anxiety, the other, and the aberrant, the figure of the monster deftly turns the mirror back on its human victims. Ecocritical Play The vast scale of ecological collapse has complicated effective public communication on the subject. The scope involved is unsettling, even paralysing, to its audiences: climate change might just be “too here, too there, too everywhere, too weird, too much, too big, too everything” to bring oneself to engage with (Tyszczuk 47). The detail involved has also been captured by scientific discourse, a detached communicative mode which too easily obviates the everyday human experience of the emergency (Bulfin 140; Abraham and Jayemanne 74–76). Considerable effort has been focussed upon producing higher-fidelity models of ecological catastrophe (Robles-Anderson and Liboiron 248), rather than addressing the more significant “trouble with representing largely intangible linkages” between micro-environmental actions and macro-environmental repercussions (Chang 86). Ecocriticism is, however, emerging as a cultural means by which the crisis, and restorative possibilities, may be rendered more legible to a wider audience. Representations of ecology and catastrophe not only sustain genres such as Eco-Disaster and Cli-Fi (Bulfin 140), but are also increasingly becoming a precondition for fiction centred upon human life (Tyszczuk 47). Media artefacts concerned with environment are able to illustrate the nature of the emergency alongside “a host of related environmental issues that the technocratic ‘facts and figures’ approach … is unlikely to touch” (Abraham and Jayemanne 76) and encourage in audiences a suprapersonal understanding of the environmental impact of individual actions (Chang 70). Popular culture offers a chance to foster ‘ecological thought’ wherein it becomes “frighteningly easy … to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected” (Morton, Ecological Thought 1) rather than founder before the inexplicability of the temporalities and spatialities involved in ecological collapse. An ecocritical approach is “one of the most crucial—yet under-researched—ways of looking into the possible cultural impact of the digital entertainment industry” upon public discourse relating to the environment crisis (Felczak 185). Video games demand this closer attention because, in a mirroring of the interconnectedness of Earth’s own ecosystems, “the world has also inevitably permeated into our technical artefacts, including games” (Chang 11), and recent scholarship has worked to investigate this very relationship. Benjamin Abraham has extended Morton’s arguments to outline a mode of ecological thought for games (What Is an Ecological Game?), Alenda Chang has closely examined how games model natural environments, and Benjamin Abraham and Darshana Jayemanne have outlined four modes in which games manifest players’ ecological relationships. Close analysis of texts and genres has addressed the capacity of game mechanics to persuade players about matters of sustainability (Kelly and Nardi); implicated Minecraft players in an ecological practice of writing upon landscapes (Bohunicky); argued that Final Fantasy VII’s plot fosters ecological responsibility (Milburn); and, identified in ARMA III’s ambient, visual backdrops of renewable power generation the potential to reimagine cultural futures (Abraham, Video Game Visions). Video games allow for a particular form of ecocriticism that has been overlooked in existing efforts to speak about ecological crisis: “a politics that includes what appears least political—laughter, the playful, even the silly” (Morton, Dark Ecology 113). Play is liminal, emergent, and necessarily incomplete, and this allows its various actors—players, developers, critics and texts themselves—to come together in non-authoritarian, imaginative and potentially radical ways. Through play, audiences are offered new and novel modes for envisioning ecological problems, solutions, and futures. To return, then, to encounters with ecological monstrosity, I next consider the visions of crisis that emerge through the video game monsters that draw upon the aberrant nature of ecological collapse, as well as those that foreground our own complicity as humans in the climate crisis, declaring that we players might ourselves be monstrous. The two case studies that follow are necessarily brief, but indicate the value of further research and textual analysis to more fully uncover the role of ecological monstrosity in contemporary video games. Breath of the Wild’s Corrupted Ecology The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) is a fantasy action-adventure game in which players adopt the role of the games series’ long-running protagonist, Link, and explore the virtual landscapes of fictional Hyrule in unstructured and nonlinear ways. Landscape is immediately striking to players of Breath of the Wild, with the game using a distinctive, high-definition cel-shaded animation style to vividly render natural environments. Within the first ten minutes of play, lush green grass sways around the player’s avatar, densely treed forests interrupt rolling vistas, and finely detailed mountains tower over the player’s perspective. The player soon learns, however, that behind these inviting landscapes lies a catastrophic corruption of natural order, and that their virtual enemies will manifest a powerful monstrosity that seems to mirror Earth’s own ecological crises. The game’s backstory centres around the Zelda series’ persistent antagonist, Ganon, and his use of a primal form of evil to overwhelm a highly evolved and industrialised Hyrulian civilisation, in an event dubbed the Great Calamity. Hyrule’s dependency on mechanical technology in its defences is misjudged, and Ganon’s re-appearance causes widespread devastation. The parallel between Hyrule’s fate and humankind’s own unsustainable commitment to heavy industry and agriculture, and faith in technological approaches to mitigation in the face of looming catastrophe, are immediately recognisable. Visible, too, is the echo of the revenge of Earth’s climate in the organic and primal force of Ganon’s destructive power. Ganon leaves in his wake an array of impossible, aberrant creatures hostile to the player, including the deformed humanoid figure of the Bokoblin (bearing snouts, arrow-shaped tails, and a horn), the sand-swimming spike-covered whale known as a Molduga, and the Stone Talus, an anthropomorphic rock formation that bursts into life out of otherwise innocuous geological features. One particularly apposite monster, known simply as Malice, is a glowing black and purple substance that oozes its way through environments in Hyrule, spreading to cover and corrupt organic material. Malice is explained by in-game introductory text as “poisonous bogs formed by water that was sullied during the Great Calamity”—an environmental element thrown out of equilibrium by pollution. Monstrosity in Breath of the Wild is decidedly ecological, and its presentation of unstable biologies, poisoned waters, and a collapsed natural order offer a conspicuous display of our contemporary climate crisis. Breath of the Wild places players in a traditional position in relation to its virtual monsters: direct opposition (Taylor 31), with a clear mandate to eliminate the threat(s) and restore equilibrium (Krzywinska 12). The game communicates its collection of biological impossibilities and inexorable corruptions as clear aberrations of a once-balanced natural order, with Hyrule’s landscapes needing purification at the player’s hands. Video games are driven, according to Jaroslav Švelch, by a logic of informatic control when it comes to virtual monsters, where our previously “inscrutable and abject” antagonists can be analysed, defined and defeated as “the medium’s computational and procedural nature makes monstrosity fit into databases and algorithms” (194). In requiring Link, and players, to scrutinise and come to “know” monsters, the game suggests a particular ecocritical possibility. Ecological monstrosity becomes educative, placing the terrors of the climate crisis directly before players’ avatars, screens, and eyes and connecting, in visceral ways, mastery over these threats with pleasure and achievement. The monsters of Breath of the Wild offer the possibility of affectively preparing players for versions of the future by mediating such engagements with disaster and catastrophe. Recognising the Monstrosity Within Set in the aftermath of the outbreak of a mutant strain of the Cordyceps fungus (through exposure to which humans transform into aggressive, zombified ‘Infected’), The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog) is a post-apocalyptic action-adventure game. Players alternate between two playable human characters, Ellie and Abby, whose travels through the infection-ravaged states of Wyoming, Washington, and California overlap and intertwine. At first glance, The Last of Us Part II appears to construct similar forms of ecology and monstrosity as Breath of the Wild. Players are thrust into an experience of the sublime in the game’s presentation of natural environments that are vastly capacious and highly fidelitous in their detailing. Players begin the game scrambling across snowbound ranges and fleeing through thick forests, and later encounter lush grass, rushing rivers, and wild animals reclaiming once-urban environments. And, as in Breath of the Wild, monstrosity in this gameworld appears to embody impurity and corruption, whether through the horrific deformations of various types of zombie bodies, or the fungal masses that carpet many of the game’s abandoned buildings in a reclamation of human environments by nature. Closer analysis, however, demonstrates that the monstrosity that defines the play experience of The Last of Us Part II uncannily reflects the more uncomfortable truths of the Anthropocentric era. A key reason why zombies are traditionally frightening is because they are us. The semblance of human faces and bodies that remain etched into these monsters’ decaying forms act as portents for our own fates when faced with staggering hordes and overwhelmingly poor odds of survival. Impure biologies are presented to players in these zombies, but rather than represent a distant ‘other’ they stand as more-than-likely futures for the game’s avatars, just as Earth’s climate crisis is intimately bound up in human origins and inexorable futures. The Last of Us Part II further pursues its line of anthropocentric critique, as both Ellie and Abby interact during the game with different groupings of human survivors, including hubristic militia and violent religious cultists. The player comes to understand through these encounters that it is the distrust, dogmatism, and depravity of their fellow humans that pose immediate threats to avatarial survival, rather than the scrutable, reliable, and predictable horrors of the mindless zombies. In keeping with the appearance of monsters in both interactive and cinematic texts, monsters’ most important lessons emerge when the boundaries between reality and fiction, human and nonhuman, and normality and abnormality become blurred. The Last of Us Part II utilises this underlying ambiguity in monstrosity to suggest a confronting ecological claim: that monstrous culpability belongs to us—the inhabitants of Earth. For video game users in particular, this is a doubly pointed accusation. As Thomas Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne observe of digital games, “however much their digital virtuality is celebrated they are enacted and produced in strikingly visceral—ontologically virtual—ways”, and such a materialist consideration “demands that they are also understood as objects in the world” (15). The ecological consequences of the production of such digital objects are too often taken for granted, despite critical work examining the damaging impact of resource extraction, electronic waste, energy transfer, telecommunications transfer, and the logics of obsolescence involved (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter; Newman; Chang 152). By foregrounding humanity’s own monstrosity, The Last of Us Part II illustrates what Timothy Morton describes as the “weirdly weird” consequences of human actions during the Anthropocene; those uncanny, unexpected, and planetarily destructive outcomes of the post-industrial myth of progress (Morton, Dark Ecology 7). The ecocritical work of video games could remind players that so many of our worst contemporary nightmares result from human hubris (Weinstock 286), a realisation played out in first-person perspective by Morton: “I am the criminal. And I discover this via scientific forensics … I’m the detective and the criminal!” (Dark Ecology 9). Playing with Ecological Monstrosity The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II confront players with an ecological form of monstrosity, which is deeply recursive in its nature. Players encounter monsters that stand in for socio-political anxieties about ecological disaster as well as those that reflect humanity’s own monstrously destructive hubris. Attention is further drawn to the player’s own, lived role as a contributor to climate crisis, a consequence of not only the material characteristics of digital games, but also their broader participation in the unsustainable economics of the post-industrial age. To begin to make the connections between these recursive monsters and analogies is to engage in the type of ecological thought that lets us see the very interconnectedness that defines the ecosystems we have damaged so fatally. In understanding that video games are the “point of convergence for a whole array of technical, cultural, and promotional dynamics of which [players] are, at best, only partially aware” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, and de Peuter 19), we see that the nested layering of anxieties, fears, fictions, and realities is fundamental to the very fabric of digital games. Recursion, Donna Haraway observes in relation to the interlinked failure of ecosystems, “can be a drag” (100), but I want to suggest that playing with ecological monstrosity instead turns recursion into opportunity. An ecocritical approach to the examination of contemporary videogame monsters demonstrates that these horrific figures, through their primordial aesthetic and affective impacts, are adept at foregrounding the ecosystemic nature of the relationship between games and our own world. Videogames play a role in representing both desirable and objectionable versions of the world, and such “utopian and dystopian projections of the future can shape our acts in the present” (Fordyce 295). By confronting players with viscerally accessible encounters with the horror of an aberrant and abjected near future (so near that it is, in fact, already the present), games such as Breath of the Wild and The Last of Us Part II can critically position players in relation to discourse and wider public debate about ecological issues and climate change (and further research could more closely examine players’ engagements with ecological monstrosity). Drawing attention to the symmetry between monstrosity and ecological catastrophe is a crucial way that contemporary games might encourage players to untangle the recursive environmental consequences of our anthropocentric era. Morton argues that beneath the abjectness that has come to define our human co-existence with other ecological actors there lies a perverse form of pleasure, a “delicious guilt, delicious shame, delicious melancholy, delicious horror [and] delicious sadness” (Dark Ecology 129). This bitter form of “pleasure” aptly describes an ecocritical encounter with ecological monstrosity: the pleasure of battling and defeating virtual monsters, complemented by desolate (and possibly motivating) reflections of the ongoing ruination of our planet provided through the development of ecological thought on the part of players. References Abraham, Benjamin. “Video Game Visions of Climate Futures: ARMA 3 and Implications for Games and Persuasion.” Games and Culture 13.1 (2018): 71–91. Abraham, Benjamin. “What Is an Ecological Game? 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