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Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?

togelius writes "What makes games fun? Some (e.g. Raph Koster) claim that fun is learning — fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve. I think we can create fun game rules automatically through measuring their learnability. In a recent experiment, we do this using evolutionary computation, and create some simple Pacman-like new games completely without human intervention! Perhaps this has a future in game design? The academic paper (PDF) is available as well."

4 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. More to the point by daveime · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can we get research grant funding automatically ?

    I believe the answer is yes.

    1. Choose a 25 year old topic (for example, a Pacmangame), reinvent it using lots of buzzwords such as swarm, hive, collective, competitive, but secretly just program a system using some generic rules, and a gradient descent algorithm that will force those generic rules to conform to the behaviour we wanted in the first place. Then publish a PDF (why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?), and spam it across tech news sites.

    2. Make some wild claim that this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius (or similar).

    3. ???

    4. Profit !

  2. I'll never forget by sleeponthemic · · Score: 4, Funny

    Walking into a computer lab at school, spying a mystified user staring at a screen. Investigating further, it turned out he was confused by the fact that

    Make Game
    Racing Game
    2 tracks

    In a programming IDE did not yield anything.

    --
    I record my sleeptalking
  3. Re:Can we? by Rogerborg · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, Raph Koster defines "fun" and "automatically" as the same thing, since in Star Wars Galaxies he designed in support for AFK macroing your way right up to the end "game".

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  4. Re:So Yankish... by Ihmhi · · Score: 3, Funny

    Actually, E.T. could be a fun component of a game. Everyone controls bulldozers and tries to shove the most cartridges into a landfill that they can.