ANGELINA is an automated game design system which has previously been built as a single software block which designs games from start to finish. In this paper we outline a roadmap for the development of a new version of ANGELINA, designed to iterate on games in different ways to produce a continuous creative process that will improve the quality of its work, but more importantly improve the perception of the software as being an independently creative piece of software. We provide an initial report of the system's structure here as well as results from the first working module of the system.
In terms of digital games, the Game-O-Matic is a vital part of automated game design history @cite_5 . Ostensibly developed as a mixed-initiative tool for journalists to rapidly create newsgames, the Game-O-Matic is effectively an entirely autonomous game designer, with a very broad understanding of game mechanics and also how to convey messages through the combination of game rules. This meaning-driven game design is reinforced by several mechanisms that allow the Game-O-Matic to retrieve artistic assets to reinforce the game's systems visually. Along similar lines, work by Nelson and Mateas in @cite_12 also shows a concerted effort to build a system which can combine systems, meaning and visuals to convey something through an interactive experience.
@cite_5 @cite_12
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Game-design novices increasingly hope to use game-like expression as a way to express content such as opinions and educational material. Existing game-design toolkits such as Game Maker ease the programming burden, bringing the design of small games within the technical reach of low-budget, non-expert groups. The design process itself remains a roadblock, however: It is not at all obvious how to present topics such as political viewpoints or bike safety in a way that makes use of the unique qualities of the interactive game medium. There are no tools to assist in that aspect of the game design process, and as a result virtually all expressive games come from a small number of game studios founded by experts in designing such games. We propose a game-design assistant that acts in a mixed-initiative fashion, helping the author understand the content of her design-in-progress, providing suggestions or automating the process where possible, and even offering the possibility for parts of the game to be dynamically generated at runtime in response to player interaction. We describe a prototype system that interactively helps authors define spaces of games in terms of common-sense constraints on their real-world references, provides support for them to understand and iteratively refine such spaces, and realizes specific games from the spaces as playable mobile-phone games in response to user input. Micro-rhetorics are the representational units of meaning that emerge from the rhetorical affordances of videogame mechanics, abstract gameplay patterns, and thematic depiction. This paper explains the concept of micro-rhetorics, how game dynamics can be interpreted, and how designers can make use of game mechanics to express ideas through simple videogames. This theoretical framework is informed by the design of Game-O-Matic, a videogame authoring tool that generates games to represent ideas. It takes a network of basic relationships between actors and assembles simple arcade-style game mechanics into videogames that are able to make arguments and depict ideas. We present a study of a mobile mixed reality game called Can You See Me Now? in which online players are chased through a virtual model of a city by ‘runners’ (professional performers equipped with GPS and WiFi technologies) who have to run through the actual city streets in order to catch the players. We present an ethnographic study of the game as it toured through two different cities and draws upon video recordings of online players, runners, technical support crew, and also on system logs of text communication. Our study reveals the diverse ways in which online players experienced the uncertainties inherent in GPS and WiFi, including being mostly unaware of them, but sometimes seeing them as problems, or treating the as a designed feature of the game, and even occasionally exploiting them within gameplay. In contrast, the runners and technical crew were fully aware of these uncertainties and continually battled against them through an ongoing and distributed process of orchestration. As a result, we encourage designers to deal with such uncertainties as a fundamental characteristic of location-based experiences rather than treating them as exceptions or bugs that might be ironed out in the future. We argue that designers should explicitly consider four potential states of being of a mobile participant: connected and tracked, connected but not tracked, tracked but not connected, and neither connected nor tracked. We then introduce five strategies that might be used to deal with uncertainty in these different states for different kinds of participant: remove it, hide it, manage it, reveal it, and exploit it. Finally, we present proposals for new orchestration interfaces that reveal the ‘seams’ in the underlying technical infrastructure by visualizing the recent performance of GPS and WiFi and predicting the likely future performance of GPS. Many new board games are designed each year, ranging from the unplayable to the truly exceptional. For each successful design there are untold numbers of failures; game design is something of an art. Players generally agree on some basic properties that indicate the quality and viability of a game, however these properties have remained subjective and open to interpretation. The aims of this thesis are to determine whether such quality criteria may be precisely defined and automatically measured through self-play in order to estimate the likelihood that a given game will be of interest to human players, and whether this information may be used to direct an automated search for new games of high quality. Combinatorial games provide an excellent test bed for this purpose as they are typically deep yet described by simple welldefined rule sets. To test these ideas, a game description language was devised to express such games and a general game system implemented to play, measure and explore them. Key features of the system include modules for measuring statistical aspects of self-play and synthesising new games through the evolution of existing rule sets. Experiments were conducted to determine whether automated game measurements correlate with rankings of games by human players, and whether such correlations could be used to inform the automated search for new high quality games. The results support both hypotheses and demonstrate the emergence of interesting new rule combinations.