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."

Comments

Different "fun" for people

[troll8901]

Good point. Different levels of "fun" and satisfaction.

Someone wrote about putting Age of Empires 2 on showroom PCs, and all the female customers went ga-ga over this game. They would then build mini cities and so on ... all without fighting. He said they wouldn't give a second look at AoE 3, or The Sims 2 ... they just wanted to play AoE 2.

Someone wrote about his entire family playing mostly older games (including all Mario games), and mostly avoiding newer, copy-protected games.

It amazes me reading these posts.

game programming would be like photography

[tacitdynamite]

In photography, you set up the boundary conditions, take a TON of pictures, then select the best ones from the ones you have. The best photographers have the best eye for selecting the remarkable ones out of the pack. This would shift game programming from an art like classical sculpture - where you have to plan far, far ahead, and don't get second chances - to an art like photography where it is more about creative curation than creative engineering. Evoluationary development of games wouldn't eliminate the creativity of the process or the product, it would change the creativity of the process and the product.