IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (2017)
While generative approaches to game design offer great promise, systems can only reliably generate what they can "understand," which is often represented in a limited, implicit form in hand-crafted evaluation functions or constructive rules. Proceduralist readings, a semi-formal approach for interpreting the meaning of a game based on its underlying processes and interactions in conjunction with aesthetic and cultural cues, offer a novel, systematic approach to game understanding. We formalize proceduralist argumentation as a logic program that performs static reasoning over game specifications to derive higher-level meanings, as part of Gemini, a bidirectional game analysis and generation system.
ICCC Workshop on Computational Creativity and Social Justice (2017)
Social justice issues are often controversial in nature, and require an appeal to emotion and empathy--rather than lists of facts--to solve. Serious games can be effective pedagogical tools, but often focus on short minigames (providing fleeting "aha" moments) that eschew the empathetic power of narrative, or vice versa. This paper presents a framework that dynamically generates sequences of short narrative and gameplay pairings, in the style of Molleindustria's Unmanned. A playtest of an initial prototype of the system in the domain of climate change speaks to the framework's potential of being an effective means of nurturing players' empathy and curiosity for controversial topics.
Twelfth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (2016)
While generative approaches to game design offer great promise, systems can only reliably generate what they can "understand," often limited to what can be hand encoded by system authors. Proceduralist readings, a way of deriving meaning for games based on their underlying processes and interactions in conjunction with aesthetic and cultural cues, offer a novel, systematic approach to game understanding. We formalize proceduralist argumentation as a logic program that performs static reasoning over game specifications to derive higher-level meanings (e.g., deriving dynamics from mechanics), opening the door to broader and more culturally-situated game generation.