An Overview of the AMUSE Social Gaming Platform

This paper presents an overview of the novel platform AMUSE (Agent-based Multi-User Social Environment), an agent-based social gaming platform that leverages the power of industrial-strength agent technologies. The core need that motivated the initial work on AMUSE was to provide game developers with a solid tool targeting common horizontal issues in social gaming, like user management and game state management, for games with synchronous and asynchronous interactions. AMUSE fulfills such a need by means of industrial-strength agent technology. Actually, AMUSE is not only a development framework that can be effectively used to implement prototypes and small-scale games with just a few concurrent players. Rather, it is thought as a PaaS (Platform as a Service) tool that enables service provides, like game portals and community portals, to relief game factories from the burden of implementing horizontal functionality that are common to a large set of games. This paper is a first presentation of the work on AMUSE and it starts framing AMUSE into the scope of social gaming. Then, the paper describes the architecture of the multi-agent system that represents the core of AMUSE and it relates the presented agent types with the functionality that AMUSE provides. Finally, the paper outlines some directions of future development