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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."
Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?
Sure we can, depending on your definition of the words 'Fun', 'Game' and 'Automatically'.
:P
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
The more I play games, both video games, board games or pen and paper RPGs, the more I see the obvious patterns that exist beneath them.
I stopped playing new boardgames as all these become obvious after a few games, and if you tend to like one, old games already implement them perfectly. You basically have 3 (arguably 4) components in any board game : randomness (go play dices if you like it), tactical planning (go play chess), bluffing (go play poker) and, arguably, negotiation that can be seen as a merge between tactics and planning but that often use a whole different range of social skills.
Video games have also some recurring ingredients. I played less of them so I fail to see them more clearly, but some of them are obvious :
- a sentiment of progression. Whether artificial (through leveling in RPG games) or real (from FPS where you get better at shooting, rocket jumping, etc...)
- hidden content of the game, that the player has to find or guess. It is usually some content voluntarily put there by the game developer (quests, levels, maps) some hidden game logic that one must understand (AIs behavior, puzzles, research trees). In the most interesting games (in my humble opinion) there is also content that is almost emergent. The creator only loosely coded some rules and it is the player's actions that create his own problems to solve. It often happens in strategic or development games, where you discover that a design you chose had some vulnerabilities and that by correcting this, you create a whole bunch of new problems.
That one last part is the most difficult to reproduce automatically, in my opinion. But a lot of successful games don't have any such emergent content, so I guess that automated games generation can prove quite fruitful !
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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 !
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.
PDF has been opened. Admittedly the standards body which supports it is ISO, but I don't think anyone bribed them to approve it.
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
Sure, if you define "fun" as "a smooth learning curve", then you can make fun games automatically.
But not all of the fun is in the learning. Some fun is in tweaking humor. Some fun is in triggering a person's likes and dislikes (Nethack, ponies). Some fun is created by changing the venue (is it a space game? a historical shoot-em-up? A politics game?
Yes, there are underlying patterns to a lot of games. But simply limiting our definition of "fun" to "learning" and "follows the pattern" reminds me of the automatic novel generations in Orwell's 1984.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Automatically? Most game dev studios can't even make fun games manually!
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.
It's not about automating creativity. It's about "creating fun GAMErules automatically". That is something entirely different. Read the text properly.
Yeah yeah yeah, because creating a computer system that automatically generates game play rules is "easy". I know! Lets get rid of computers and go back to abacuses because computers made accounting too "easy" and now our economy is in the crapper.
This system (like all computer-based systems) is simply a tool. No, it can't be truly creative. So what? Maybe I've got a great idea for a game, but I'm terrible at balancing the difficulty level. This tool (or one like it) could help me balance my game and increase it's playability.
This tool doesn't mean the end of creativity, it means that a previously arduous task can now be partially automated. Speaking as a technologist - that's a good thing.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.