An experiment in automatic game design

This paper presents a first attempt at evolving the rules for a game. In contrast to almost every other paper that applies computational intelligence techniques to games, we are not generating behaviours, strategies or environments for any particular game; we are starting without a game and generating the game itself. We explain the rationale for doing this and survey the theories of entertainment and curiosity that underly our fitness function, and present the details of a simple proof-of-concept experiment.

[1]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games , 1980, SIGSMALL '80.

[2]  Stewart W. Wilson,et al.  A Possibility for Implementing Curiosity and Boredom in Model-Building Neural Controllers , 1991 .

[3]  Jürgen Schmidhuber,et al.  Curious model-building control systems , 1991, [Proceedings] 1991 IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks.

[4]  Jürgen Schmidhuber,et al.  Exploring the predictable , 2003 .

[5]  Katie Salen,et al.  Rules of play: game design fundamentals , 2003 .

[6]  William V. Wright,et al.  A Theory of Fun for Game Design , 2004 .

[7]  Risto Miikkulainen,et al.  Real-time neuroevolution in the NERO video game , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.

[8]  Georgios N. Yannakakis.  AI in computer games : generating interesting interactive opponents by the use of evolutionary computation , 2005 .

[9]  Simon M. Lucas,et al.  Evolving a Neural Network Location Evaluator to Play Ms. Pac-Man , 2005, CIG.

[10]  Peta Wyeth,et al.  GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games , 2005, CIE.

[11]  Jörg Denzinger,et al.  Dealing with Parameterized Actions in Behavior Testing of Commercial Computer Games , 2005, CIG.

[12]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Evolving robust and specialized car racing skills , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation.

[13]  Risto Miikkulainen,et al.  Evolving visibly intelligent behavior for embedded game agents , 2006 .

[14]  Jürgen Schmidhuber,et al.  Developmental robotics, optimal artificial curiosity, creativity, music, and the fine arts , 2006, Connect. Sci..

[15]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Evolving A Diverse Collection of Robot Path Planning Problems , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Evolutionary Computation.

[16]  Steffen Priesterjahn.  Online imitation and adaptation in modern computer games , 2007 .

[17]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Point-to-Point Car Racing: an Initial Study of Evolution Versus Temporal Difference Learning , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[18]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games , 2007, 2007 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[19]  Cameron Browne,et al.  Automatic generation and evaluation of recombination games , 2008 .