A prototype using territories and an affordance tree for social simulation gameplay

Smart objects are a representation strategy for games and virtual worlds, in which information about object interactions is distributed into the objects themselves: an object knows how it can be used, what kinds of effects it has, etc. In this work, we describe a prototype that aims to explore social simulation using smart objects. We extend the concept of smart objects to include a model of human behavior with regard to territoriality. To manage complexity in worlds with many such objects we employ a tree structure, which we call an Affordance Tree. The Affordance Tree allows the spatial containment of the affordances in the environment to be hierarchically organized.