Game Meta Balance

This repository is the official implementation of the paper titled "Bilevel Entropy based Mechanism Design for Balancing Meta in Video Games".

Brief Description: Our paper formulates the game meta balance problem as mechanism design problem. We set the objective of the designer as maximizing the entropy of a (given) player's mixed strategy (over the strategy space) at nash equilibrium. Such a formulation, paired with state-of-the-art solvers leads to a scalable algorithm as shown in our paper. The repository provides an official implementation of our problem formulation. The respository also serves as a benchmark for game balance on three domains (source code adapted from respective gits)

1. Rock Paper Scissor Fire Water (RPSFW)
2. Workshop Workfare (WW) (also referred as coolgame in code)
3. Pokemon Video Game Championship (VGC)

If you find our work useful in your research please consider citing our paper:

@inproceedings{game-balance-2023-bigmb,
  title     = {Bilevel Entropy based Mechanism Design for Balancing Meta in Video Games},
  author    = {Pendurkar, Sumedh and
               Chow, Chris and
               Jie, Luo and
               Sharon, Guni
               },
  booktitle = {The 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS)},
  month = {May},
year = {2023}
}

Installation

poetry install

if you are in a pip-only environment, then

pip install -r requirements.txt

If elo and gym have difficulty installing. get into the virtualenv that poetry creates and pip install the particular versions needed.

Running Experiments

poetry run python src/metagame_balance/main.py

coolgame experiments

usage: main [-h] [--n_epochs N_EPOCHS] [--snapshot_gameplay_policy_epochs SNAPSHOT_GAMEPLAY_POLICY_EPOCHS] [--snapshot_game_state_epochs SNAPSHOT_GAME_STATE_EPOCHS] [--reg REG] [--baseline]
            {rpsfw,vgc,coolgame} ...

positional arguments:
  {rpsfw,vgc,coolgame}  domain

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --n_epochs N_EPOCHS
  --snapshot_gameplay_policy_epochs SNAPSHOT_GAMEPLAY_POLICY_EPOCHS
  --snapshot_game_state_epochs SNAPSHOT_GAME_STATE_EPOCHS
  --reg REG
  --baseline

usage: main coolgame [-h] [--cmaes_init_var CMAES_INIT_VAR] [--entropy_eval_epochs ENTROPY_EVAL_EPOCHS]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --cmaes_init_var CMAES_INIT_VAR
  --entropy_eval_epochs ENTROPY_EVAL_EPOCHS

Using poetry:

poetry run main coolgame

or, using python directly

python ./src/metagame_balance/main.py coolgame

(keeping in mind you can use the commandline args above.)

License

Copyright © Niantic, Inc. 2023. Patent Pending. All rights reserved. Please see the license file for terms.