LUDOCORE: A logical game engine for modeling videogames

LUDOCORE is a logical “game engine”, linking game rules as reasoned about by game designers to the formal logic used by automated reasoning tools in AI. A key challenge in designing this bridge is engineering a concise, safe, and flexible representation that is compatible with the semantics of the games that logical models created with our engine intend to represent. Building on the event calculus, a formalism for reasoning about state and events over time, and a set of common structures and idioms used in modeling games, we present a tool that is capable of generating gameplay traces that illustrate the game's dynamic behavior. It supports incremental modeling of player and non-player entities in the game world, modification of game rules without extensive non-local changes, and exploratory temporal and structural queries. In addition, its logical models can support play as real-time, graphical games with minimal user-interface description.