3CG: Collaborative and Creative Content Generation in Game Design

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) systems have become more and more prevalent in game design and development (especially in the indie game community), as seen in popular games such as No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Hades, Spelunky, The Binding of Issac, and many others. These systems create unique experiences and interactions for the player every time they play, ideally leading to a longer, deeper engagement with the game. Most PCG systems are based on one-way interaction, where the system generates content for the player based on internal rules set by the game developers. However, what if there was a way to have the player influence how the content is generated? What if the system could learn from the players, and adapt its design process in real-time? In this talk, I'll show how game developers can create that two-way feedback loop between the player and the back-end AI system to create content that feels more human-like, more challenging, and more engaging.

References

• Baba is Y'all 2.0: Design and Investigation of a Collaborative Mixed-Initiative System by M Charity, Isha Dave, Ahmed Khalifa, Julian Togelius [site]
• Aesthetic Bot
• Wizard Sokoban
• Fostering Creativity in the Mixed-Initiative Evolutionary Dungeon Designer by Alberto Alvarez, Steve Dahlskog, Jose Font, et al.
• Picbreeder: Evolving Pictures Collaboratively Online by Jimmy Secretan, Nicholas Beato, David B. D’Ambrosio, Adelein Rodriguez, Adam Campbell, and Kenneth O. Stanley [site]
• Pitako - Recommending Game Design Elements in Cicero by Tiago Machado, Dan Gopstein, Andy Nealen, Julien Togelius

M Charity (they/them) is a PhD student at NYU Tandon in the Game Innovation Lab studying under Dr. Julian Togelius. Their main research focus is in collaborative creative AI - systems that can work outside of the box and find multiple creative solutions to a single problem with the help of human users. Much of their work involves procedural content generation, quality-diversity search algorithms, and evolutionary algorithms. Past research they've done include virtual reality game design and natural language processing.

M also likes to make games and pixel art, play music, and draw comics in their spare time when they're not absorbing new research papers. You can find them almost anywhere on the internet with the username MasterMilkX - most notably on Twitter, Itch.io, and GitHub.

• Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=AKXHtd8AAAAJ&hl=en
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MasterMilkX
• GitHub: https://github.com/MasterMilkX
• Itch.io: https://mastermilkx.itch.io/