AUTOMATED GAME DESIGN | BETA
return the same result for the same level. But it’s the wider reflection on having played it – almost like a QA department – that changes every time someone changes the rule-set. That’s where the context sensitive stuff comes in.”
ANGELINA’S JOLLY The idea is that games that are too easy, too hard, or simply unplayable, get eliminated during the many iterations of test and selection. But the difficulty with this technology is that any procedural content generation system has a chance of producing duds. “One of the things about evolution I found
is that I’ll think I’m more clever than the system, having told it to design things in a certain way, and it will produce something that’s absolutely awful but fits my specification perfectly. It will sit there with this smug grin on its face saying ‘This is what you asked for’.” The problem of a non-zero error rate is
common to all such techniques. “It would look a bit weird if there was a palm tree in the middle of this carpet right now”, he says. But a machine wouldn’t necessarily think
so. While the approach works wonderfully for a game like Minecraft, which could be said to benefit from the random oddness of its procedurally generated worlds, it is less acceptable for a game that needs a world we can believe in. “There’s an infancy element to it”, Cook
says. “In the future I would love to think that we would produce systems that don’t have this problem”. But Cook adds it might also be a matter of selective use: “Over time the best games will be the ones that learn where and when to apply procedural generation”.
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION “People ask whether my research is going to cause designers to not be needed in the industry anymore”, says Cook. “But I think the more procedural generation takes over from certain design tasks, the more we’re going to realise what art there is in video games and the more we’re going to appreciate this thing that we’ve never really taken much notice of before.” Indeed, as the tech industries have done in other areas, harnessing brute-force computation for creative tasks may simply be a way to focus our creative contributions. “Artists and designers are not going
anywhere. Programmers are not going anywhere. I like this idea that AI will become a collaborator in the design process, not replace it. I can’t see anyone losing their jobs over this, certainly.” Instead, he imagines a collaborative dialogue: “A developer would sit down and program a design idea into Angelina and Angelina will say ‘That’s great, I had a couple of ideas, would you like to see them?’ Suddenly it will have changed one of your
power-ups into something else and maybe it’ll be terrible and you’ll say ‘cancel it and go back to what I had’ or maybe it’ll be this completely other twist on your game mechanic and you’ll think ‘wow, that was a brilliant idea’.”
His favourite touchstone is Braid, a game that understands the conventions of its genre so well it turns them on their head. “At the moment Angelina isn’t inventing
new concepts; it’s exploring an existing space,” he explains, but wonders what kind of system could discover new concepts and hopes to find out. Cook is evangelical about the collaborative
potential between researchers and developers. Seeing parallels between his research and the experimental character of many recent indie games, he recently took his ideas to the TIGSource community. “The indie games industry and the indie games ethic, as well as that brand, has made them amenable to the idea of research
I like this idea that AI will become a
collaborator in the design process. I can’t see anyone losing their jobs
over this, certainly. Mike Cook, Angelina
projects”, he says. “That’s one of the reasons I came to TIGsource. I said ‘look, I’m not actually an indie game developer, but it looks like this is an indie game project, it feels like one’. I think that’s why there’s been such a positive reaction. People are in that mind set already.”
THE LANDSCAPE OF CHANGE It used to be that developers used procedural generation to solve a content problem, but more and more it’s because players like what it brings to a game. Citing Minecraft again, he notes there are “websites
where they just discuss the landscape. Nothing else. They say ‘look at this cliff formation I found’. People who think of gamers as these Modern Warfare 3 junkies would be slightly weirded out by this idea that gamers are discussing geology.” Cook is understandably excited about the possibilities, but Angelina’s future will be grounded in a player’s mentality. “There have been attempts to evolve
balanced maps for Starcraft”, he says. “But when they asked people if the maps were balanced, many said they weren’t. “Even though they could prove mathematically they were balanced, the players didn’t feel they were. And ultimately that’s all that’s ever going to matter.”
Douglas Heaven is a freelance writer, ex- computer scientist, and online editor for I, Science magazine. He has worked with robots, played in bands and currently lives
with four feline automatons. FEBRUARY 2012 | 45
Angelina has helped develop games such as Flixelvania (top) from her home at the Imperial College London’s Computational Creativity Research Group (above)
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