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The Iceberg Profile Does Not Influence the Performance of Elite League of Legends Players, but Changes with the Events of the Game IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Adrián Mateo-Orcajada, Lucía Abenza-Cano, Juan Pablo Rey-López, Raquel Vaquero-Cristóbal
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GAILPG: Multi-Agent Policy Gradient with Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Wei Li, Shiyi Huang, Ziming Qiu, Aiguo Song
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The 1st ChatGPT4PCG Competition IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Febri Abdullah, Pittawat Taveekitworachai, Mury F. Dewantoro, Ruck Thawonmas, Julian Togelius, Jochen Renz
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Towards Real-time G-buffer-Guided Style Transfer in Computer Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Eleftherios Ioannou, Steve Maddock
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Predicting Wargame Outcomes and Evaluating Player Performance from an Integrated Strategic and Operational Perspective IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Yusheng Sun, Yuxiang Sun, Jiahui Yu, Yuanbai Li, Xianzhong Zhou
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Puzzle-Level Generation with Simple-tiled and Graph-based Wave Function Collapse Algorithms IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Hwanhee Kim, Beomjoo Seo, Shinjin Kang
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Cultural Insights in Souls-like Games: Analyzing Player Behaviors, Perspectives, and Emotions Across a Multicultural Context IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Sicheng Pan, Gary J.W. Xu, Kun Guo, Seop Hyeong Park, Hongliang Ding
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GamiDOC: The Importance of Designing Gamification in a Proper Way IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Simone Bassanelli, Antonio Bucchiarone, Federica Gini
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BaziGooshi: A Hybrid Model of Reinforcement Learning for Generalization in Gameplay IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Sara Karimi, Sahar Asadi, Amir H. Payberah
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Examining the Usability of the Moirai Serious Game Authoring Platform IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Andrei Torres, Bill Kapralos, Adam Dubrowski
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Rulebook: An Architectural Pattern for Self-Amending Mechanics in Digital Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Wilson Kazuo Mizutani, Fabio Kon
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Countdown VR: a Serious Game in Virtual Reality to Develop Mental Computation Skills IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Hubert Cecotti, Mathilde Leray, Michael Callaghan
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A Systematic Review of Model-Driven Game Development Studies IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Amirreza Payandeh, Mohammadreza Sharbaf, Shekoufeh Kolahdouz Rahimi
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Searching bug instances in gameplay video repositories IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Mohammad Reza Taesiri, Finlay Macklon, Sarra Habchi, Cor-Paul Bezemer
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Piecing Together Performance: Collaborative, Participatory Research-Through-Design for Better Diversity in Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Daniel L. Gardner, LouAnne Boyd, Reginald T. Gardner
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Multigoal Reinforcement Learning via Exploring Entropy-Regularized Successor Matching IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-08-11 Xiaoyun Feng, Yun Zhou
Multigoal reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms tend to achieve and generalize over diverse goals. However, unlike single-goal agents, multigoal agents struggle to break through the exploration bottleneck with a fair share of interactions, owing to rarely reusable goal-oriented experiences with sparse goal-reaching rewards. Therefore, well-arranged behavior goals during training are essential for
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Generating Interpretable Play-Style Descriptions Through Deep Unsupervised Clustering of Trajectories IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Branden Ingram, Clint van Alten, Richard Klein, Benjamin Rosman
In any game, play style is a concept that describes the technique and strategy employed by a player to achieve a goal. Identifying a player's style is desirable as it can enlighten players on which approaches work better or worse in different scenarios and inform developers of the value of design decisions. In previous work, we demonstrated an unsupervised LSTM-autoencoder clustering approach for play-style
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Mouse Sensitivity in First-Person Targeting Tasks IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Ben Boudaoud, Josef Spjut, Joohwan Kim
Mouse sensitivity in first-person targeting tasks is a highly debated issue. Recommendations within a single game can vary by a factor of 10× or more and are an active topic of experimentation in both competitive and recreational esports communities. Inspired by work in pointer-based gain optimization and extending our previous results from the first user study focused on mouse sensitivity in first-person
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Elastic Monte Carlo Tree Search IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Linjie Xu, Alexander Dockhorn, Diego Perez-Liebana
Strategy games are a challenge for the design of artificial intelligence agents due to their complexity and the combinatorial search space they produce. State abstraction has been applied in different domains to shrink the search space. Automatic state abstraction methods have gained much success in the planning domain and their transfer to strategy games raises a question of scalability. In this article
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The Professional Go Annotation Dataset IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Yifan Gao, Danni Zhang, Haoyue Li
The field of Go game research is hampered by the absence of records and analytical tools. In recent years, the increasing number of professional competitions and the advent of AlphaZero-based algorithms have provided an excellent opportunity for analyzing human games on a large scale. In this article, we present the ProfessionAl Go annotation datasEt (PAGE), containing 98 525 games played by 2007 professional
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Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Evolutionary Computation for Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Jacob Schrum, Jialin Liu, Cameron Browne, Anikó Ekárt, Marcus Gallagher
The eight papers in this special section focus on applications of evolutionary computation to games to demonstrate several ways in which evolution can push boundaries and explore new areas of what is possible in the realm of games research, with a focus on game-playing, automatic agent parameter tuning, automatic game testing, and procedural content generation.
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Beyond Playing to Win: Creating a Team of Agents With Distinct Behaviors for Automated Gameplay IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Cristina Guerrero-Romero, Simon Lucas, Diego Perez-Liebana
In this article, we present an approach to generate a team of general video game playing agents with differentiated behaviors that can ultimately assist in the game development process. We consider the agent behavior as the corresponding outcomes of playing the game: rate of wins, score, exploration, enemies killed, items collected, etc. We create and identify agents that are expected to achieve particular
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Using Evolutionary Algorithms to Target Complexity Levels in Game Economies IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Katja Rogers, Vincent Le Claire, Julian Frommel, Regan Mandryk, Lennart E. Nacke
Game economies (GEs) describe how resources in games are created, transformed, or exchanged: They underpin most games and exist in different complexities. Their complexity may directly impact player difficulty. Nevertheless, neither difficulty nor complexity adjustment has been explored for GEs. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge about complexity in GEs, how to define or assess it, and how it can
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DIJS: Methodology for the Design and Development of Digital Educational Serious Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Federico Archuby, Cecilia Sanz, Cristina Manresa-Yee
Digital serious games (SG) have been considered useful in different fields, including education. Several authors focus on their design and development to minimize possible errors in the process and be able to meet the objectives proposed by the game. This article presents a review that considers works, where strategies and methodologies are proposed to facilitate the task of designing an SG. Based
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IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Information IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-15
Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.
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WagerWin: An Efficient Reinforcement Learning Framework for Gambling Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Haoli Wang, Hejun Wu, Guoming Lai
Although reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great success in diverse scenarios, complex gambling games still pose great challenges for RL. Common deep RL methods have difficulties maintaining stability and efficiency in such games. By theoretical analysis, we find that the return distribution of a gambling game is an intrinsic factor of this problem. Such return distribution of gambling games
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Graph Embedding Augmented Skill Rating System IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Jiasheng Wang
This article presents a framework for learning player embeddings in competitive games and events. Players and their win–loss relationships are modeled as a skill gap graph, which is an undirected weighted graph. The player embeddings are learned from the graph using a random walk-based graph embedding method and can reflect the relative skill levels among players. Embeddings are low-dimensional vector
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Case Study of Player Behavior in a Mobile Free-to-Play Interactive Story Telling Game IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Mirko Sužnjević, Mihael Miklec, Suraja Poštić
With mobile gaming becoming ever more popular, it is necessary to understand various aspects of player behavior in those games. This is especially true for free-to-play games as revenue comes from a small subset of the playerbase. This article presents a large-scale analysis of data collected over 9 months, comprising over 10 million players of a case study free-to-play mobile interactive story telling
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Deep Game Location Acquisition for Pokemon GO on Mobile Devices IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 Min-Chi Chiu, Chung-Hua Chu
Advanced augmented reality (AR) games such as Pokemon Go attract millions and millions of players because they integrate various sensors to impress excellent user experiences on mobile devices. In this article, for energy saving on the mobile devices, we can use an accelerometer and a magnetometer to estimate the current user's location approaching interest of points on a game map without active GPS
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Procedural Generation of Narrative Worlds IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-25 J. Timothy Balint, Rafael Bidarra
A narrative world typically consists of several interrelated locations that, all together, fully support enacting a given story. For this, each location in a narrative world features all the objects as required there by the narrative, as well as a variety of other objects that plausibly describe or decorate the location. Procedural generation of narrative worlds poses many challenges, including that
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Multiagent Systems on Virtual Games: A Systematic Mapping Study IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Jose Barambones, Juan Cano-Benito, Ismael Sánchez-Rivero, Ricardo Imbert, Florian Richoux
Context: Games are a well-established scenario to test AI and multiagent systems (MAS) proposals due to their popularity and defiance. However, there is no big picture of the application of this technology to games, the evolution of the kind of problem tackled, or the game scenarios in which agents have been experimented. Objective: To perform a systematic mapping to characterize the state of the art
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Learning and Motivational Impact of Using a Virtual Reality Serious Video Game to Learn Scrum IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-10-10 Daniel López-Fernández, Jesus Mayor, Jennifer Pérez, Aldo Gordillo
Today, there is a great variety of learning techniques and methodologies: traditional lectures, role-plays, group dynamics, project-based learning, simulations, educational games, and so on. Regarding technology-enhanced learning, the educational usage of virtual reality is innovative and the initiatives carried out suggest that this technology is an appealing medium for young people that facilitates
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Table of Contents IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-14
Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.
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IEEE Transactions on Games Publication Information IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-14
Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.
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IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Information IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-09-14
Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.
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Evolving the MCTS Upper Confidence Bounds for Trees Using a Semantic-Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm in the Game of Carcassonne IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-31 Edgar Galván, Gavin Simpson, Fred Valdez Ameneyro
Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a sampling best-first method to search for optimal decisions. One popular selection mechanism that has proved to be reliable in MCTS is based on the Upper Confidence bounds for Trees (UCT). This attempts to balance exploration and exploitation. However, some tuning of the MCTS UCT is necessary for this to work well. In this work, we use Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs)
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Evolving Woodland Camouflage IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Joseph Alexander Brown, Marco Scirea
Camouflage serves a dual purpose in games, imparting believability of the world and narrative and being a game asset used by players for customization. Using the U.S. Woodland Battle Dress Uniform or M81 as an inspiration for the pattern, we present a system for generating camouflage using a process based on present military evaluations. The proposed approach is a genetic algorithm that uses image
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Genetic-WFC: Extending Wave Function Collapse With Genetic Search IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-07-21 Raphael Bailly, Guillaume Levieux
This article presents genetic wave function collapse (WFC), a procedural level generation algorithm that mixes genetic optimization with WFC, a local adjacency constraints propagation algorithm. We use a synthetic player to evaluate the novelty, safety, and complexity of the generated levels. Novelty is maximized when the synthetic player goes on tiles not visited for a long time, safety is related
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A Formal Approach to Distinguish Games, Toys, Serious Games and Toys, Serious Repurposing and Modding, and Simulators IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-28 Julian Alvarez, Damien Djaouti, Sandy Louchart, Yoann Lebrun, Nabil Zary, Sophie Lepreux, Christophe Kolski
While the serious game concept has considerably evolved in the last two decades, it still needs to be clearly differentiated from other types of artifacts. Thus, there is a degree of confusion about the relationship between serious games and other related applications, such as simulators or the repurposing of entertainment games within educational practices for most outside the domain. This article
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Cognition-Driven Multiagent Policy Learning Framework for Promoting Cooperation IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-27 Zhiqiang Pu, Huimu Wang, Boyin Liu, Jianqiang Yi
Many attempts have been made to promote cooperation for multiagent systems. However, several issues that draw less attentions but may dramatically degrade the cooperation performance still exist, such as redundant information interactions among neighbors, and difficulties in understanding complex and dynamic environments from high-level cognition. To address these limitations, a cognition-driven multiagent
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Table of Contents IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-15
Presents the table of contents for this issue of the publication.
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IEEE Transactions on Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-15
Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.
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Call for Papers—Ieee Transactions on Games Special Issue on User Evaluation for Vr Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-15
Prospective authors are requested to submit new, unpublished manuscripts for inclusion in the upcoming event described in this call for papers.
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IEEE Computational Intelligence Society IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-15
Presents a listing of the editorial board, board of governors, current staff, committee members, and/or society editors for this issue of the publication.
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Measuring Control to Dynamically Induce Flow in Tetris IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-14 Diana Sofía Lora-Ariza, Antonio A. Sánchez-Ruiz, Pedro Antonio González-Calero, Irene Camps-Ortueta
Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) is a set of techniques that aim to automatically adapt the difficulty of a video game based on the player’s performance. This article presents a methodology for DDA using ideas from the theory of flow and case-based reasoning (CBR). In essence, we are looking to generate game sessions with a similar difficulty evolution to previous game sessions that have produced
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Exergaming Training Experience for Children: A Systematic Review of Qualitative Assessments With Meta-Synthesis IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-13 Maziah Mat Rosly, Nor Aina Mohd Jai, Nasrul Anuar Abd Razak, Dorothy Dewitt
Exergames are gaining popularity among children and youths. They are physically-demanding video games that require players to perform active tasks or sport-like actions for in-game control. The experiences described by relevant parties from verbatim interviews in exergaming training programs were systematically reviewed and meta-synthesized into the relevant themes. The experiences of parents, teachers
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Multiagent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-08 Stephen Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Mira Fisher, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell
In interactive narratives, experience management is used to control the world and the nonplayer characters (NPCs) a player interacts with, encouraging particular types of stories or discouraging others. The space of all stories in a narrative can be understood as a story graph, with story states as nodes and actions in the story as directed edges. In this article, we present experience management as
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Keep Calm and Aim for the Head: Biofeedback-Controlled Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in a Horror Game IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-06-03 Paraschos Moschovitis, Alena Denisova
Who said that violent video games cannot promote calm behavior? Could we reverse engineer the difficulty system of a horror game to encourage the player to stay calm as opposed to feeling under constant pressure? To explore the feasibility of the approach and its effectiveness, we created a horror game, Caroline , which uses the player’s biometric data to adapt the difficulty of the game: if the player
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Real-Time Prediction of Simulator Sickness in Virtual Reality Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-27 Jialin Wang, Hai-Ning Liang, Diego Monteiro, Wenge Xu, Jimin Xiao
Virtual reality (VR) technology has progressed rapidly and is used in various domains, particularly games. Simulator sickness (SS) still represents a significant problem for its wider adoption. The most common way to detect SS is using the simulator sickness questionnaire (SSQ). SSQ is a subjective measurement and is inadequate for real-time applications such as VR games. This research aims to develop
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Dynamically Interrupting Deadlocks in Game Learning Using Multisampling Multiarmed Bandits IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Rendong Chen, Fa Wu
In many reinforcement learning (RL) game tasks, an episode should be interrupted after a certain time, as the agent could sometimes fall into a deadlock state. The learning process is sensitive to the interruption length. So, it is hard to determine an optimal value of interruption. This article presents a novel multiarmed bandit (MAB) model to dynamically interrupt the deadlock state in reinforcement
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On Mixed-Initiative Content Creation for Video Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Gorm Lai, Frederic Fol Leymarie, William Latham
In this article, we present a survey of mixed-initiative methods for the creation of content for video games. We also propose a definition of what mixed initiative implies, as the term lacks a clear specification. The survey includes works not directly aimed at video games but which create content that can potentially be used in games, such as art programs utilizing mixed initiative. Furthermore, we
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“Bad Vibrations”: Sensing Toxicity From In-Game Audio Features IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Elizabeth Reid, Regan L. Mandryk, Nicole A. Beres, Madison Klarkowski, Julian Frommel
Toxicity in online gaming is a problem that causes harm to players, developers, and gaming communities. Toxic behaviors persist in online multiplayer games for a number of reasons, and continue to go unchecked due in large part to a lack of reliable methods to accurately detect toxicity online, in real-time, and at scale. In this article, we present a modeling approach that uses features derived from
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Procedural Level Generation for Sokoban via Deep Learning: An Experimental Study IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-19 Yahia Zakaria, Magda Fayek, Mayada Hadhoud
Deep learning for procedural level generation has been explored in many recent works, however, experimental comparisons with previous works are rare and usually limited to the work they extend upon. The goal of this article is to conduct an experimental study on four recent deep learning procedural level generators for Sokoban to explore their strengths and weaknesses. The methods will be bootstrapping
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Explainable AI for Cheating Detection and Churn Prediction in Online Games IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-10 Jianrong Tao, Yu Xiong, Shiwei Zhao, Runze Wu, Xudong Shen, Tangjie Lyu, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu, Sha Zhao, Gang Pan
Online gaming is a multibillion dollar industry that entertains a large, global population. Empowering online games with AI has made a great success, however, ignores the explainability of black-box model makes AI less responsible and hinders its further development. In this article, we introduce and discuss the audience and the concept of XAI (eXplainable AI) in online games. We propose a GXAI workflow
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Rinascimento: Playing Splendor-Like Games With Event-Value Functions IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-05-03 Ivan Bravi, Simon Lucas
In the realm of games research, artificial general intelligence algorithms often use score as the main reward signal for learning or playing actions. However, this has shown its limitations in scenarios where the rewards are very rare or absent until the end of the game. The problem is even more severe when the computational budget available is limited. This article proposes a new approach based on
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Hybrid Encoding for Generating Large Scale Game Level Patterns With Local Variations IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-27 Jacob Schrum, Benjamin Capps, Kirby Steckel, Vanessa Volz, Sebastian Risi
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a powerful indirect genotype-to-phenotype mapping for evolutionary search. Much previous work applying GANs to level generation focuses on fixed-size segments combined into a whole level, but individual segments may not fit together cohesively. In contrast, segments in human designed levels are often repeated, directly or with variation, and organized into
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Generating and Adapting to Diverse Ad Hoc Partners in Hanabi IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Rodrigo Canaan, Xianbo Gao, Julian Togelius, Andy Nealen, Stefan Menzel
Hanabi is a cooperative game that brings the problem of modeling other players to the forefront. In this game, coordinated groups of players can leverage preestablished conventions to great effect. In this article, we focus on ad hoc settings with no previous coordination between partners. We introduce a “Bayesian Meta-Agent” that maintains a belief distribution over hypotheses of partner policies
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Dungeons & Replicants II: Automated Game Balancing Across Multiple Difficulty Dimensions via Deep Player Behavior Modeling IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-19 Johannes Pfau, Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Rainer Malaka
Video game testing has become a major investment of time, labor, and expense in the game industry. Particularly the balancing of in-game units, characters, and classes can cause long-lasting issues that persist years after a game's launch. While approaches incorporating artificial intelligence have already shown successes in reducing manual effort and enhancing game development processes, most of these
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Turing Completeness and Sid Meier’s Civilization IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-12 Adrian de Wynter
We prove that three strategy video games from the Sid Meier’s Civilization series: Sid Meier’s Civilization: Beyond Earth , Sid Meier’s Civilization V , and Sid Meier’s Civilization VI , are Turing-complete. We achieve this by building three universal Turing machines—one for each game—using only the elements present in the games, and using their internal rules and mechanics as the transition function
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Playtesting: What is Beyond Personas IEEE Trans. Games (IF 2.3) Pub Date : 2022-04-11 Sinan Ariyurek, Elif Surer, Aysu Betin-Can
Playtesting is an essential step in the game design process. Game designers use the feedback from playtests to refine their designs. Game designers may employ procedural personas to automate the playtesting process. In this article, we present two approaches to improve automated playtesting. First, we propose developing persona , which allows a persona to progress to different goals. In contrast, the