=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1099/paper9
|storemode=property
|title=An Overview of the AMUSE Social Gaming Platform
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1099/paper9.pdf
|volume=Vol-1099
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aiia/BergentiCG13a
}}
==An Overview of the AMUSE Social Gaming Platform==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1099/paper9.pdf
An Overview of the AMUSE
Social Gaming Platform
Federico Bergenti Giovanni Caire and Danilo Gotta
Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica Telecom Italia S.p.A.
Università degli Studi di Parma Via Reiss Romoli 274, 10148 Torino, Italy
Parco Area delle Scienze 53/A, 43124 Parma, Italy Email: {giovanni.caire, danilo.gotta}@telecomitalia.it
Email: federico.bergenti@unipr.it
Abstract—This paper presents an overview of the novel also be smoothly scaled up to huge services. We use WADE
platform AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User Social Environment), every day in our laboratories, and it is worth noting that the
an agent-based social gaming platform that leverages the power same software has been in daily use over the last 5 years [23]
of industrial-strength agent technologies. The core need that for large-scale network and service management in Telecom
motivated the initial work on AMUSE was to provide game Italia for more than 8.95 million broadband connections for
developers with a solid tool targeting common horizontal issues
in social gaming, like user management and game state manage-
retail and business customers over a network of 114 million
ment, for games with synchronous and asynchronous interactions. km of copper lines and 5.7 million km of optical fibers [22].
AMUSE fulfills such a need by means of industrial-strength This is the reason why we say that the choice of implementing
agent technology. Actually, AMUSE is not only a development AMUSE on top of WADE ensure low-budget game develop-
framework that can be effectively used to implement prototypes ment, giving the possibility to deploy the platform, and then
and small-scale games with just a few concurrent players. Rather, smoothly scale up the service to a large number of users and
it is thought as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) tool that enables to hosted deployment, if needed.
service provides, like game portals and community portals, to
relief game factories from the burden of implementing horizontal WADE is essentially the main evolution of JADE (Java
functionality that are common to a large set of games. This Agent and DEvelopment framework) [4], [5], [7], [8], [16],
paper is a first presentation of the work on AMUSE and it the open-source framework that facilitates the development
starts framing AMUSE into the scope of social gaming. Then,
of interoperable multi-agent systems. JADE has been used
the paper describes the architecture of the multi-agent system
that represents the core of AMUSE and it relates the presented in many research and industrial systems at an international
agent types with the functionality that AMUSE provides. Finally, scale since its initial development back in 1998 and today it
the paper outlines some directions of future development. is a reference for industrial-strength agent technology. WADE
mainly adds to JADE the support for the execution of tasks
defined according to the workflow metaphor, and it also
I. I NTRODUCTION provides a number of mechanisms that help managing the
This paper describes a recent work in the important indus- inherent complexity of a (distributed) multi-agent system both
trial sector of online social games: an agent-based innovative in terms of administration and fault tolerance.
platform that leverages the power of industrial-strength agent
technologies to provide game developers with horizontal fea- While we measure a decline in investments in social
tures that are common to most, if not all, online social games. gaming [1], social gaming, and mobile gaming in particular,
Such a platform, namely AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User is still on the rise from a game count perspective, with the
Social Environment), gives developers a set of functionality industry seeing a 105% [18] increase in the number of mobile
that free them from the burden of implementing, and possibly and social games on the market since 2000. Moreover, the
reimplementing over and over again, common features like industry experienced its biggest boom just last year, in 2012,
user management and game state management. The approach when total games reached from 90 million to more than
that AMUSE fosters lets developers concentrating their effort 211 million total [21]. This is sufficient to justify a research
on game-specific features, it ensures solidity, and it ultimately investment in this industrial sector as it is one of the driving
reduces time-to-market and increases product quality. forces of IT today.
AMUSE is designed to meet the requirements of large- This paper is not only intended to provide an overview
scale service providers and it is intended for a PaaS (Platform of AMUSE, rather it is also meant to frame the work on
as a Service) usage in large-scale scenarios. This, combined AMUSE in the broad scope of social gaming in order to
with the expected scalability of underlying agent technology, motivate, identify and justify the core design decisions. In the
makes AMUSE an ideal tool for experimental prototypes following section we frame AMUSE into the broad research on
intended can scale up to large-scale services. In fact, AMUSE social gaming by giving essential definitions and terminology.
is developed on top of WADE (Workflows and Agents Develop- Then, in Section III we outline the coarse-grained architecture
ment Environment) [3], [24], the popular open-source platform of AMUSE and we detail the roles of single agents and
for agent-based BPM (Business Process Management). One their responsibilities. Finally, we conclude the paper with a
of the key characteristics of WADE is that it can be easily brief summary of the work and with some insight on future
deployed on commodity computers and networks, and it can developments of AMUSE.
II. W HAT IS S OCIAL G AMING ? Finally, to better understand the landscape of social gam-
ing, we should remember that gameplay is the specific way
The industry of video games, and online video games in
in which players interact with a game and, in particular,
particular, plays a significant role in our society that has been
with a video game. We can adopt one of the many available
recently boosted by the pervasive diffusion of games for mobile
definitions of gameplay as follows:
appliances. Actually, the peculiar combination of novel game
dynamics with the functionality of modern mobile appliances, Gameplay is the formalized interaction that occurs
like undisrupted connectivity, advanced graphics and sound when players follow the rules of a game and expe-
capabilities, and on-board sensors, ensures a prolific and long rience its system though play. [20]
lasting synergy between the industries of mobile appliances
and video games. Once we are happy with the fact that the play activity and
games are social in nature, we need to discuss how so called
A. Basic Terminology social online games, or social games for short, differentiates
from other forms of games. This discussion has lead us to
Scientists and philosophers from diverse background have identifying salient characteristics of social games that any
been discussing the notion of play and game for a long social gaming platform like AMUSE is demanded to provide.
time, and they have already established agreed results and
terminology.
B. A Characterization of Social Gaming
One of the most cited attempts to characterize the play
A primitive approach is to take the platform perspective
activity dates back to mid-50’s to Huizinga’s Play Theory.
and mark as social any game that use a social network
In his seminal book, best known as Homo Ludens, Huizinga
platform. These are the so called social network games and the
characterizes the play activity as:
pervasiveness of online social networks in our society makes
. . . a free activity standing quite consciously outside them one of the most important examples of social games.
“ordinary” life as being “not serious” but at the same Any game delivered via, e.g., Facebook, is a social network
time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It game but unfortunately this is by far not enough to allow us to
is an activity connected with no material interest, descend any salient characteristic of a social gaming platform.
and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds A less primitive approach leads to a notable body of
within its own proper boundaries of time and space literature that identifies many dimensions of social gaming.
according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It Here we restrict to a threefold characterization that relates
promotes the formation of social groupings that tend to the timing of social interactions and to the type of social
to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress relationship [19]. Together, these characteristics encapsulate
the difference from the common world by disguise the social interactions of most online games, including the two
or other means. [14] extremes of the range, namely, MMOs (Massive Multi-player
Even if this characterization of the play activity has un- Online games), that group hardcore players in large and long-
dergone very reasonable critiques over the years, it is worth lasting games, and casual games, targeted at and used by a
noting that the act of playing is always associated with a social mass audience of casual players for short burst. A real-world
nature, and we can broadly say that the play activity is social social gaming platform should be able to provide support for
per se. the whole, or at least for a large part, of this spectrum, and
the scalable design of AMUSE ensures this.
Unfortunately a characterization of the play activity is
not enough because we generally differentiate games from In summary, the three characteristics of social gaming that
play. The Huizinga’s characterization includes rules in the we consider here, and that we detail below, are [19]:
play activity, but such rules are always flexible and subject
• Synchronous vs. asynchronous player interaction. Do
to change, with no real need for rules to be agreed or adopted
interactions occur simultaneously in real time or at
beforehand. On the contrary, games are based on rules that are,
different times as in a turn-based game?
often implicitly, adopted and that are not subject to frequent
or unjustified change. Rules structure games, and make them • Symmetrical vs. asymmetrical relationship formation.
repeatable. Does forming a relationship require input from both
parties or can they be formed unilaterally by a single
One of the most cited definitions of game, which has been
party?
recently developed in the scope of video games by Juul, defines
a game as a: • Strong tie vs. loose tie relationship evolution. Do
relationships tend to become deep and long lasting
. . . rule-based formal system with a variable and or are they more likely to be light and transitory?
quantifiable outcome, where different outcomes are
assigned different values, the player exerts effort The remaining of this section is devoted to analyzing
in order to influence the outcome, the player feels such characteristics and providing example of how they are
attached to the outcome, and the consequences of concretely adopted in social games.
the activity are optional and negotiable. [17]
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Interaction. The superficial
Games inherit much from the play activity and all games understanding is that MMO games feature synchronous, real-
are social in some sense, if nothing else, because players often time play while casual social games are asynchronous with in-
retell their experiences. teraction occurring at disconnected times. However, all MMOs
also feature important asynchronous features like in-game gaming is the formation of social connections in Facebook
messages, and some Facebook game employs synchronous versus Twitter. Facebook social relationships are symmetric:
features such as a chat. Rather than an absolute position, a member of the community asks to be a friend of another
current social games tend to offer a mix of synchronous and member and the latter must agree in turn for the relationship to
asynchronous interactions. Some games may highlight one or exist. This approach as the advantage of making the acknowl-
the other, but there are many that use both to establish a richer edgment mutual between parties and thus allowing for deeper
layer of engagement and retention. sharing. On the contrary, the interaction is often limited to
confirmed friends and friend relationships require (sometimes
The idea of synchronous gameplay is intuitively easy:
complex) management tools.
players interact in real time rather than taking turns. Examples
of synchronous social interactions include text chat, voice Examples of symmetric social interactions in online gam-
chat, video chat, and game elements like battles. Synchronous ing include friending, gifting, trading, and private chatting on
interactions can scale from two players to large groups. an individual scale, and parties, alliances, and manual multi-
The term asynchronous game might at first remind images player matchmaking on a group scale.
of something slower and less intriguing, but asynchronous Twitter social relationships are asymmetric: a member of
games can be just as engaging as synchronous ones, e.g., think the community can follow anyone, without their reciprocation.
of playing chess with a remote friend. Asynchronous social This approach enables a widespread broadcasting and facil-
games come in different basic flavors, with some of the more itates rapid dissemination of information. On the contrary, it
common being: requires less investment in social relationship and can be more
• Turn-based shared games. They work well socially prone to unsolicited interactions because communication filters
because each move is a mini game and there is are necessarily less sophisticated.
social pressure to come back and complete the next Examples of asymmetric social interactions include fol-
turn. Moreover, bite-sized gameplay is easy to fit into lowing, broadcasting, tweeting, and blogging on an individual
schedules and players can play multiple games at once. scale, and public quests, factions, and random matchmaking
• Turn-based challenge games. Essentially, one of such on a group scale.
games quickly becomes a set of two separate matches.
Although Facebook games are less known for such sym-
Player 1 challenges and then player 2 responds; aggre-
metric relationships, they do exist in many games. The neigh-
gate score determines the winner. They work socially
bor approach prevalent in many games is a symmetrical social
because of the social pressure to return challenge
relationship. Even players who are in the same game and that
and there is less waiting than shared turn-based since
are already Facebook friends still need to become neighbors.
each player can complete his/her entire game indepen-
dently. Facebook games also feature numerous asymmetric social
• Score-based challenge games. These are the traditional interactions. Instead of the neighbor approach, many games
beat my high score format. These games work socially simply add a player’s Facebook social graph directly to his/her
because of the social pressure to return challenge game without requiring the permission of friends. These types
and there is less waiting than turn-based options of relationships are shallower than the ones originating from
since players can try for their high scores anytime. the neighbor approach but, because they are so broad, they
Obviously, these types of games can be less interactive lower the barriers to interaction and they create a high-density
than other types. of ties among players.
• Open-world asynchronous games. In many ways, this Asymmetric relationships also exist in MMOs. A great
is the most common Facebook game model. It works example of this is the public quest. For example, if a public
socially because the model supports a variety of game enemy is attacking the area, anyone who comes within a
modes, including single-player and multi-player. It certain range is automatically considered to be participating in
can variably approximate MMO experience without the public quest to capture him/her. Players can quickly and
incurring into the technical issues of real-time play. easily get a taste of group play and then go their own ways
Moreover, it still offers convenience of more casual afterwards. The low social barrier allows for more frequent
games, i.e., players can play at different times and for cooperation.
short bursts. Strong Tie vs. Loose Tie. The former symmetry characteristic
Having said this, it is worth noting that chats are a powerful describes how relationships form but it does not necessarily
synchronous tool for player engagement and retention in dictate how they evolve. Ultimately, the relationship depends
both casual games and MMOs that deserves special attention, on what happens after the relationship itself has just been
especially from the platform point of view. The chat, as a part established. This characteristic is a simple measures of the
of the game experience, always has a similar effect: boosting evolution of a social relationship with a focus on the depth of
player engagement and facilitating long-term retention. When interaction.
there is a real, vibrant support community present, players
Examples of strong-tie gaming relationships range from
come back to a game more often and are less likely in search
the smallest scale, i.e., two players co-operatively play, to the
for other games.
group scale. Examples of loose-tie relationships also range
Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Relationship. Perhaps the from the smallest scale, e.g., game neighbors, to the group
clearer example for understanding this characteristic of social scale.
III. T HE AMUSE P LATFORM Back-end and front-end agents implement the social gam-
ing features of the platform depending on the centralization
AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User Social Environment) is
required by each and every single feature. For example,
an open-source development platform that can be downloaded
involving players in a mobile game does not always require a
from JADE Web site [16] and that is intended to tackle specific
centralized authority: the agent on the user’s mobile device
issues of social games, as discussed previously in this paper.
contacts the respective agents of other users by means the
The platform can be easily deployed in an in house setting,
users’ profile stored locally in the device. AMUSE provides
but it is designed to give service providers a tool to implement
such a feature by assigning specific responsibilities to front-
a PaaS with specific features of social games.
end agents. On the contrary, the management of a table in a
room to let players engage in synchronous card game implies
A. The Architecture of AMUSE
some centralized management of tables and rooms, as AMUSE
The characterization of social games sketched in Section II actually provides.
does not provide any means to concretely implement the
In summary, the design of AMUSE comprises the follow-
desired features in a platform. In other words, we can classify
ing types of back-end agents that cooperatively deliver the
a part of a game as employing symmetrical or asymmetrical
functionality of the platform together with front-end agents:
relationships, but we have no best-practice tool to offer to
developers to implement either symmetrical of asymmetrical • UMA (User Manager Agent). A socially inclined
relationships. Gameplay design patterns [10] are a pattern evolution of user manager agents of many other agent-
language that summarizes best practices in video game de- based systems that manages the profile of single users
velopment and they are good reference for a list of features and his/her relationships with other users. It relies
that a social gaming platform should provide. on the underlying social network infrastructure for
Not all the over 700 gameplay design patterns identified in the concrete storage and discovery of profiles and
the literature and collected by the Gameplay Design Pattern relationships.
Project [12] are interesting from the point of view of AMUSE. • GRA (Games Room Agent). It is an agent in charge
Some pattern is not related to the social aspect of games, while of managing the shared game space in games with
others are intended to provide specific features to games and synchronous interaction. It can be effectively used to
they do not identify platform-level abstractions. We restrict deliver asynchronous interaction if a back-end support
here only to the best known gameplay design pattern that can is needed.
contribute to the identification of the features that a social
gaming platform like AMUSE should provide. • AMA (Application Manager Agent). Taking the PaaS
perspective, it is the agent in charge of managing the
Before going into the details of the gameplay design pattern provided games and their lifecycle.
that AMUSE adopted, we need to clarify some underlying
design decisions. First, we always assume the availability of • MTA (Match Tracer Agent). It serves the needs of
a lower-level infrastructure for managing social relationships games that require a persistent game state and that
between users. This can be either a third-party infrastructure, needs restart options.
like Facebook, providing a rich user profile and counting a
large number of relationships between users; or it can be Finally, AMUSE provides a generic MMA (Match Manager
a private infrastructure accessible only from within AMUSE Agent) in charge of interfacing the client application with back-
games, and normally providing a restricted user profile and end agents and to deliver the features that do not require a
a restricted set of relationships. AMUSE provides a generic back-end support. For the current design, it is the only front-
interface that hides to the developers whether the infrastructure end agent that AMUSE provides.
is third-party or private, thus ensuring scalability and allowing
for the right infrastructure to be adopted for each game. B. Adopted Gameplay Design Patterns
Another early decision that was taken is that AMUSE After this brief sketch of the architecture of the multi-
should provide a very flexible and highly scalable environment agent system that implements AMUSE functionality, we can
capable of scaling up with the success of a game. This enables briefly enumerate the gameplay design pattern that AMUSE
early prototypes and low-cost experiments that can scale up to uses internally, and that implement the features for game
huge phenomena. WADE (Workflows and Agents Development developers. Not all the following gameplay design pattern are
Environment) [3], [24], the open-source platform for agent- currently implemented in AMUSE, but they are all important
based BPM (Business Process Management), is the ideal tool to grasp where AMUSE intends to go in the long term.
for ensuring such a high level of scalability and flexibility Some of the gameplay design patterns adopted in the design
because one of its key characteristics is that it can be easily of AMUSE deal with the state of the game and with its
deployed on commodity computers and networks, and it can evolution over time. These are implemented by the GRA, and
also be smoothly scaled up to huge services like nationwide the GRA itself provides an abstract view of the game state:
network and service management [22].
• Private game spaces. The game has parts of the game
Having said this, we simply decided to follow the best
world that only a single player can manipulate directly.
practices of WADE development and identified a set of back-
end agents running on the server-side platform that commu- • Massively single-player online games. These are
nicate with front-end agents in charge of managing the actual games that make use of other players’ games instances
interaction with the user. to provide input to the game state.
Together with the MTA, the GRA also implement the The available MMA is also in charge of providing a text
persistent game world design pattern, intended to make the channel that players can use for social interactions parallel to
game state independent from individual players’ game and the actual play activity.
play session. The game state is available continuously and in
The current GRA prototype provides a game state repre-
continuous evolution.
sentation that has proven valid for a wide range of games and
Other gameplay design patterns that the GRA implements it is based on the abstractions of rooms and tables, that players
regard the management of how time is correlated with the share and that provide the principal means of interaction during
evolution of the game, as follows: the game.
• Tick-based games. The game progresses according to Taking the PaaS perspective, AMUSE now provides a
real-time, but in discrete steps. prototype AMA that manages the interaction with the under-
lying WADE platform and that enables developers to choose
• Events timed to real world. Gameplay events are between decentralized (or client-only) and server-based types
initiated by specific real-time events occurring. of deployment. For the case of server-based deployment, the
AMA already provides the features needed to leverage the
The UMA implements with no specific cooperation with flexible deployment schemes of WADE, which ensures that
other agents the extra-game events broadcasting, that allows the server would not become a system bottleneck.
game events to be broadcast in a medium where others can per-
ceive them. This pattern is implemented by the UMA because Moreover, the available AMA provides all needed adminis-
it is the only agent that can interact with the underlying online tration services to quickly set up a private gaming infrastruc-
social network infrastructure and its notification services. ture that, thanks to WADE, can scale up far over the initial
deployment.
Moreover, the UMA together with the GRA implement the
following design patterns: Finally, AMUSE includes a prototype MTA that is in charge
of using WADE persistency support to implement persistent
• Drop-in/Drop-out. Players entering and leaving ongo- and restartable game state.
ing game sessions are welcome.
Front-end agents are now restricted to Android agents or
• Public player statistics. The platform provides a desktop agents because, at the moment, no porting of JADE
means to publicize the player statistics inside and is available for other platforms. All in all, the flexible and
outside the game to users. The underlying online somehow standardized agent communication protocol makes
social network infrastructure is used to access the the interface between back-end and front-end agents fully
users’ relationships and to publicize the statistics. device agnostic, and we see no problems is accommodating
• Visits. Under the application of UMA policies, the new and unexpected user devices in the architecture.
GRA can provide temporary access to other players’ It is worth noting that current AMUSE prototype already
private game spaces. includes Web games because we assume that such games can
be structured into a lightweight client module connected to a
• Invites. Under the application of UMA policies, and
heavyweight server module. We can already have server-side
taking into account the logics of the underlying social
agents, running inside JADE/WADE containers, that commu-
network infrastructure, the GRA allows inviting new
nicate with the lightweight-client user interface via one of the
players to a game as game actions.
available Web communication protocols, e.g., WebSockets.
Finally, only the non-player help design pattern request the
cooperation of the UMA, the GRA and the MMA to ensure that IV. C ONCLUSIONS
players can receive help in the games by actions from those This paper presents the basic ideas that guided the develop-
not playing. ment of AMUSE, a novel agent-based social gaming platform.
The initial motivation for this work is that we felt the urge
C. The Implementation of AMUSE So Far for a sharable tool capable of providing horizontal features
The current implementation of AMUSE does not yet pro- of social gaming and we thought that agent technology, and
vides all features described in the previous section, even if a WADE in particular, would have been ideal for this. Agent
clear plan is drawn to achieve full functionality briefly. technology has already been applied to foster collaboration
(see, e.g., [9]) and, more recently, it was used to address
At the time of writing AMUSE provides a UMA with large-scale social networks (see, e.g., [6]), thus providing a
restricted functionality that manages a private online social net- solid base for the coordination of large communities. The
work infrastructure. It is also able to manage various possible initial vague idea that stimulated this work eventually turned
game involvement schemes and it is the final responsible for into a complex architecture that encompasses back-end agents
stored user profiles, which also include public game statistics. and front-end agents cooperatively providing social gaming
features to developers.
Prototype GRA and MMA are provided to implement
games with synchronous or asynchronous interactions. For the AMUSE leverages the power of WADE to provide game
moment, the type of interaction that characterize the game is developers and social gaming service providers with a scalable
statically assigned and a game cannot have diverse parts with architecture with applicability ranging from initial prototypes
diverse types of interactions, nor it can dynamically change to large-scale deployment. We think that this is a very impor-
the type of interaction. tant feature of AMUSE because it restricts the time-to-market
and it extends the range of possible AMUSE developers to the tation on concrete examples provided significant feedback on
open-source community, which is provided with fully open- core platform-level decisions. In addition, early experimenta-
source tools. tion allowed us to identify interesting best practices in the
utilization of AMUSE that were not initially envisaged.
At present AMUSE uses WADE only for its proven features
of flexibility and scalability in deployment. It does not really AMUSE is open-source and it can be downloaded from
take advantage of the other major feature of WADE, namely JADE Web site [16].
its workflow-based development approach. This ensures that
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