The challenge of Automatic Level Generation for platform videogames based on Stories and Quests

In this article we bring the concepts of narrativism and ludology to automatic level generation for platform videogames. The initial motivation is to understand how this genre has been used as a storytelling medium. Based on a narrative theory of games, the differences among several titles have been identified. In addition, we propose a set of abstraction layers to describe the content of a quest-based story in the particular context of videogames. Regarding automatic level generation for platform videogames, we observed that the existing approaches are directed to lower abstraction concepts such as avatar movements without a particular context or meaning. This leads us to the challenge of automatically creating more contextualized levels rather than only a set of consistent and playable entertaining tasks. With that in mind, a set of higher level design patterns are presented and their potential usages are envisioned and discussed

Enhancing automatic level generation for platform videogames

This dissertation addresses the challenge of improving automatic level generation processes for plat-form videogames. As Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques evolved from the creation of simple elements to the construction of complete levels and scenarios, the principles behind the generation algorithms became more ambitious and complex, representing features that beforehand were only possible with human design. PCG goes beyond the search for valid geometries that can be used as levels, where multiple challenges are represented in an adequate way. It is also a search for user-centred design content and the creativity sparks of humanly created content. In order to improve the creativity capabilities of such generation algorithms, we conducted part of our research directed to the creation of new techniques using more ambitious design patterns. For this purpose, we have implemented two overall structure generation algorithms and created an addi-tional adaptation algorithm. The later can transform simple branched paths into more compelling game challenges by adding items and other elements in specific places, such as gates and levers for their activation. Such approach is suitable to avoid excessive level linearity and to represent certain design patterns with additional content richness. Moreover, content adaptation was transposed from general design domain to user-centred principles. In this particular case, we analysed success and failure patterns in action videogames and proposed a set of metrics to estimate difficulty, taking into account that each user has a different perception of that concept. This type of information serves the generation algorithms to make them more directed to the creation of personalised experiences. Furthermore, the conducted research also aimed to the integration of different techniques into a common ground. For this purpose, we have developed a general framework to represent content of platform videogames, compatible with several titles within the genre. Our algorithms run over this framework, whereby they are generic and game independent. We defined a modular architecture for the generation process, using this framework to normalise the content that is shared by multiple modules. A level editor tool was also created, which allows human level design and the testing of automatic generation algorithms. An adapted version of the editor was implemented for the semi-automatic creation of levels, in which the designer may simply define the type of content that he/she desires, in the form of quests and missions, and the system creates a corresponding level structure. This materialises our idea of bridging human high-level design patterns with lower level automated generation algorithms. Finally, we integrated the different contributions into a game prototype. This implementation allowed testing the different proposed approaches altogether, reinforcing the validity of the proposed archi-tecture and framework. It also allowed performing a more complete gameplay data retrieval in order to strengthen and validate the proposed metrics regarding difficulty perceptions

Modern Trends in the Automatic Generation of Content for Video Games

Attractive and realistic content has always played a crucial role in the penetration and popularity of digital games, virtual environments, and other multimedia applications. Procedural content generation enables the automatization of production of any type of game content including not only landscapes and narratives but also game mechanics and generation of whole games. The article offers a comparative analysis of the approaches to automatic generation of content for video games proposed in last five years. It suggests a new typology of the use of procedurally generated game content comprising of categories structured in three groups: content nature, generation process, and game dependence. Together with two other taxonomies – one of content type and the other of methods for content generation – this typology is used for comparing and discussing some specific approaches to procedural content generation in three promising research directions based on applying personalization and adaptation, descriptive languages, and semantic specifications

Game Artificial Intelligence: Challenges for the Scientific Community

This paper discusses some of the most interesting challenges to which the games research community members may face in the área of the application of arti cial or computational intelligence techniques to the design and creation of video games. The paper focuses on three lines that certainly will in uence signi cantly the industry of game development in the near future, speci cally on the automatic generation of content, the a ective computing applied to video games and the generation of behaviors that manage the decisions of entities not controlled by the human player.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Increasing generality in machine learning through procedural content generation

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) refers to the practice, in videogames and other games, of generating content such as levels, quests, or characters algorithmically. Motivated by the need to make games replayable, as well as to reduce authoring burden, limit storage space requirements, and enable particular aesthetics, a large number of PCG methods have been devised by game developers. Additionally, researchers have explored adapting methods from machine learning, optimization, and constraint solving to PCG problems. Games have been widely used in AI research since the inception of the field, and in recent years have been used to develop and benchmark new machine learning algorithms. Through this practice, it has become more apparent that these algorithms are susceptible to overfitting. Often, an algorithm will not learn a general policy, but instead a policy that will only work for a particular version of a particular task with particular initial parameters. In response, researchers have begun exploring randomization of problem parameters to counteract such overfitting and to allow trained policies to more easily transfer from one environment to another, such as from a simulated robot to a robot in the real world. Here we review the large amount of existing work on PCG, which we believe has an important role to play in increasing the generality of machine learning methods. The main goal here is to present RL/AI with new tools from the PCG toolbox, and its secondary goal is to explain to game developers and researchers a way in which their work is relevant to AI research

Procedural Content Generation: Goals, Challenges and Actionable Steps

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of procedural content generation (PCG) in games. It starts with defining three grand goals of PCG, namely multi-level multicontent PCG, PCG-based game design and generating complete games. The way these goals are defined, they are not feasible with current technology. Therefore we identify nine challenges for PCG research. Work towards meeting these challenges is likely to take us closer to realising the three grand goals. In order to help researchers get started, we also identify five actionable steps, which PCG researchers could get started working on immediately

Serious gama for integration in higher education

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

The Rationalist’s Spirituality: Campbell’s Monomyth in Single-Player Role-Playing Videogames Skyrim & Mass Effect

This thesis is an investigation of how mythographer Joseph Campbell’s monomyth narrative pattern manifests in computer and console role-playing videogames (CRPGs). It argues that this pattern is conducive to the CRPG being received as a spiritual experience, one potentially transformative in its capacity to impart and facilitate the practice of monomythic values by players, both within the game world and without. Focusing on two CRPG games, Skyrim and Mass Effect, it considers noteworthy parallels between the monomythic quest structure of these games and the ‘quest’ nature of authenticity—the modern, individual, personal search for meaning, analysing how the CRPG’s emphasis on the ‘epistemologically individualistic’ reflects aspects of alternative spirituality (as against traditional institutional religion). As such, the CRPG actively seeks to reconcile the spiritual with the material in a ‘rationalist’s spirituality’, a fact best represented in the game’s logical structuring of the monomythic hero’s journey to apotheosis as rites of passage (that is, as successive stages of narrative, but also as a numerical ‘levelling’ system for avatar development). The spiritual is exemplified by the presence of the monomythic pattern and by how the videogame draws upon themes native to fantastic fiction (ruins, deep time, dark genesis, the sublime), themes which evoke the enchanted world and ‘porous self’ of pre-modern society and represent a desire for re- enchantment and thus an enduring interest in the spiritual. These elements together operate within the rationalised framework of a rule-based game system, where the player has the freedom and agency native to the modern, rationally empowered ‘buffered self’ but is ultimately (and somewhat contrarily) answerable to these very same rules, as determined by a god-like designer. This relationship suggests a continuing albeit surreptitious belief in the transcendent, validating Victoria Nelson’s assertion that art and entertainment in the modern world serves as an ‘unconscious wellspring of religion’ (2001: viii). This thesis also explores the CRPG’s capacity to fulfil the four functions traditionally played by mythology—the mystical, cosmological, sociological and pedagogical—as described in the writings of Joseph Campbell, looking at how the sociological and pedagogical in particular are addressed by the monomythic narrative and the implicit values of this narrative (such as devotion of the self to the community). It will argue that the CRPG—in its capacity to facilitate embodied learning and action (as ritualised performance and contest)—serves as an ideal environment for the practice and possible adoption of such values by the player. Adoption, as I will illustrate, is influenced by a number of factors. Firstly, the game itself as an experience (its narrative and emotive credibility, and thus player investment in their character, or more specifically that character is an idealised construct—the ‘projective identity’). Secondly, how the player’s role is framed within the game world, and thirdly, how the player reads his/her experience. This reading can be to some degree shaped by a game’s goals and rules, and this is where procedural rhetoric—the use of game-based systems for the purposes of persuasion—may help to foreground monomythic values and lessons as well as encourage active practice of these values in day-to-day life. Herein lies the CRPG’s potential to fulfil the Romantic proposition that art can inspire moral improvement in the individual and instigate efforts to realise an idealised world. While games are ultimately shaped by the tastes of the market and the demands of the CRPG community, the question of whether a videogame should actively adopt such an approach is one that arguably falls to game designers: authors of the game-as-text. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the thesis, while Chapter 2 explores the transition from pre-modern society to modern secularity as a default position in the West, the disappearance of the enchanted world, the emergence of alternative spiritualities as a recourse to institutional religion, and the ‘quest’ spirit that characterises the modern search for meaning (authenticity). Chapter 3 looks at the four functions previously played by mythology and how the CRPG can fulfil them, arguing for a classification of the CRPG as an alternative spirituality, and also as a continuation of a tradition of fantastic fiction representing a desire for re-enchantment, one whose origins may very well be found in modern crises of meaning. Chapter 4 details the origins of CRPG in wargaming and fantastic fiction, discussing the videogame genre’s unique emphasis on player choice, agency and autonomy, while analysing how the monomythic pattern manifests in Skyrim and Mass Effect, as well as its implied values, such as the commitment of the individual to the service of his/her society. Chapter 5 discusses how the CRPG combines fantastic fictional worlds with rational rules. The spiritual takes the form of the abovementioned aesthetic themes and the monomythic pattern, which together signal an enduring interest in re-enchantment and thus the spiritual. The rational takes the form of the videogame’s distinct emphasis on the powers of the player as a rational agent, powers that nevertheless are shaped by the rules of a transcendent, god- like game designer. This melding of the spiritual with the material, it will be asserted, represents a desire to reconcile these two disparate elements in a form of ‘rationalised’ spirituality. Chapter 6 analyses how the videogame as a form of external symbolic media can facilitate the transference of monomythic values and act as an arena for the embodied practice of these values. The transfer of such practice into the world beyond the game depends upon player investment in his/her role (via his/her idealised ‘projective identity’) and the game as a ritualised performance and contest for, if not representation of, monomythic values. Chapter 7 investigates how procedural rhetoric may help to persuade players of the significance and possible utility of monomythic values, by not only involving the player in everyday moral/ethical dilemmas within the game world but also giving him/her the freedom to address these dilemmas as s/he see fit, while discouraging actions that compromise the ‘heroic’ image of the monomythic hero. This chapter will also suggest ways for CRPGs to avoid formulaic storytelling and problematic depictions of the monomythic hero, so as to better improve the CRPG’s ability to persuade players of monomythic values and hence fulfil the pedagogical and sociological functions ascribed by this thesis. The question of whether such functions should be associated with the CRPG is one, I will argue, that game designers alone can address