Procedural content generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) is the umbrella term for approaches that generate content for games via machine learning. One of the benefits of PCGML is that, unlike search or grammar-based PCG, it does not require hand authoring of initial content or rules. Instead, PCGML relies on existing content and black box models, which can be difficult to tune or tweak without expert knowledge. This is especially problematic when a human designer needs to understand how to manipulate their data or models to achieve desired results. We present an approach to Explainable PCGML via Design Patterns in which the design patterns act as a vocabulary and mode of interaction between user and model. We demonstrate that our technique outperforms non-explainable versions of our system in interactions with five expert designers, four of whom lack any machine learning expertise.
Super Mario Bros. (SMB) represents a common area of research into PCGML @cite_24 @cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_17 . Beyond explainability, our approach differs from prior SMB PCGML approaches in terms of representation quality and the size of generated content. We focus on the generation of individual level sections instead of entire levels in order to better afford collaborative level building @cite_15 . Second, prior approaches have abstracted away the possible level components into higher order groups. For example, treating all enemy types as equivalent and ignoring decorative elements. We make use of a rich representation of all possible level components and an ordering that allows our approach to place decorative elements appropriately.
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_24 @cite_15 @cite_17
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Procedural content generation and design patterns could potentially be combined in several different ways in game design. This paper discusses how to combine the two, using automatic platform game level design as an example. The paper also present work towards a pattern-based level generator for Super Mario Bros. (SMB), which is based on an analysis of the levels of the original SMB game where we found 23 different patterns. The Level Generation Competition, part of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS)-sponsored 2010 Mario AI Championship, was to our knowledge the world's first procedural content generation competition. Competitors participated by submitting level generators - software that generates new levels for a version of Super Mario Bros tailored to individual players' playing style. This paper presents the rules of the competition, the software used, the scoring procedure, the submitted level generators, and the results of the competition. We also discuss what can be learned from this competition, both about organizing procedural content generation competitions and about automatically generating levels for platform games. The paper is coauthored by the organizers of the competition (the first three authors) and the competitors. We present a novel approach to player modeling based on a convolutional neural net trained on game event logs. We test our approach and a hybrid extension over two distinct games, a clone of Super Mario Bros. and Gwario, a human computation version of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels. We demonstrate high accuracy in predicting a variety of measures of player experience across these two games. Further we present evidence that our technique derives quality design knowledge and demonstrate the ability to build a more general model. We try to clarify the concept of procedural content generation (PCG) through contrasting it to other forms of content generation in games with which it could easily be mistaken, and through discussing some properties of PCG which are sometimes thought of as necessary but are actually not. After drawing up some clear demarcations for what is and what is not PCG, we present two versions of a content generation system for Infinite Mario Bros which is intentionally designed to question these same demarcations. We argue that, according to our own definition, one version of the system is an example of PCG while the other is not, even though they are mostly identical. We hope that this paper answers some questions but raises others, and inspires researchers and developers to thread some less common ground in developing content generation techniques.