Darwin's Avatars: a Novel Combination of Gameplay and Procedural Content Generation

Abstract

The co-evolution of morphology and control for virtual crea-tures enables the creation of a novel form of gameplay and procedural content generation. Starting with a creature evolved to perform a simple task such as locomotion and removing its brain, the remaining body can be employed in a compelling interactive control problem. Just as we en-joy the challenge and reward of mastering helicopter flight or learning to play a musical instrument, learning to con-trol such a creature through manual activation of its actu-ators presents an engaging and rewarding puzzle. Impor-tantly, the novelty of this challenge is inexhaustible, since the evolution of virtual creatures provides a way to proce-durally generate content for such a game. An endless series of creatures can be evolved for a task, then have their brains removed to become the game’s next human-control chal-lenge. To demonstrate this new form of gameplay and con-tent generation, a proof-of-concept game—tentatively titled Darwin’s Avatars—was implemented using evolved creature content, and user tested. This implementation also provided a unique opportunity to compare human and evolved control of evolved virtual creatures, both qualitatively and quanti-tatively, with interesting implications for improvements and future work