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Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu Jan 15, 2009 05:50 AM
from the sounds-much-easier,-i-like-it dept.
from the sounds-much-easier,-i-like-it dept.
togelius writes "What makes games fun? Some (e.g. Raph Koster) claim that fun is learning — fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve. I think we can create fun game rules automatically through measuring their learnability. In a recent experiment, we do this using evolutionary computation, and create some simple Pacman-like new games completely without human intervention! Perhaps this has a future in game design? The academic paper (PDF) is available as well."
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So Yankish... (Score:3, Insightful)
You want your creativity to be automated?
You desserve what you'll get, welcome to your dump...
Hope the rest of the world will leave you there, for once.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Why this was modded -1 is beyond me - it's true.
From the Internet bubble to the housing bubble, it's all been "let me have it all without having to work."
Sure, this can create a bunch of derivative games ... so you'll end up with 50 variants of tetris, 40 of scrabble, maybe they'll even "rediscover" wordtris. There's no creativity there.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Funny)
Actually, E.T. could be a fun component of a game. Everyone controls bulldozers and tries to shove the most cartridges into a landfill that they can.
Parent
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, this can create a bunch of derivative games
So how is this any different that what we have now? How many "me too" games have you played that add nothing to their respective genres? Sure, these usually end up in the bargain bin within short order, but the industry is already derivative at times, so automating that part of the process is just a way to make that part of it cheaper.
Granted, I don't know if that will drive down the price of 2nd-tier games or cause more companies to make derivative drivel (*I'd* take a month's worth of profit at current prices for a game that I made simply by pressing the "make new game" button.).....but will it really change much? Unless a game is an A-tier game, they are quickly passed over based on reviews and word of mouth. The games with staying power offer something new and different which clearly won't be of the "push here for new game" type.
Parent
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it's been "let me have it all with some simple work at the beginning, and a smoothly increasing amount of work appropriate to my increasing skills as time goes on".
Although this totally fails to explain Nethack, which is easy to learn but has more of a difficulty cliff than a difficulty ramp...
Parent
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever thought that sometimes a troll is right?
Better yet, did you even read the FA?
The formula for how they grade a game is defective. For example - "A game that can be won by random moves receives a -1".
One of the first games you ever played, tic-tac-toe can be won a decent amount of the time with random moves. Ditto rogue.
The article sucked, as does the idea of creating games by combining features of other games. We already have way too much of that everywhere - hollywood, tv, music, etc.
This is what happens when you don't have any creativity - you come up with yet another way to leach off others creativity.
The world doesn't need "Yet Another PacMan Clone." It also doesn't need someone who thinks that they can whore this out to game publishers as a way to save money producing more shovelware. We already see too much of that crap out there. If there is any trolling going on, it's the writers of the article who are doing it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
One of the first games you ever played, tic-tac-toe can be won a decent amount of the time with random moves. Ditto rogue.
Dude, I can't even win rogue with deliberate moves. I think you'd have a higher chance in chess.....
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
if the government bailout (or budget for that matter) was auto generated it would be better than the current scenario.
Re:So Yankish... (Score:5, Insightful)
This system (like all computer-based systems) is simply a tool. No, it can't be truly creative. So what? Maybe I've got a great idea for a game, but I'm terrible at balancing the difficulty level. This tool (or one like it) could help me balance my game and increase it's playability.
This tool doesn't mean the end of creativity, it means that a previously arduous task can now be partially automated. Speaking as a technologist - that's a good thing.
Parent
Re:So Yankish... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Can we? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can We Create Fun Games Automatically?
Sure we can, depending on your definition of the words 'Fun', 'Game' and 'Automatically'.
:P
Different "fun" for people (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point. Different levels of "fun" and satisfaction.
Someone wrote about putting Age of Empires 2 on showroom PCs, and all the female customers went ga-ga over this game. They would then build mini cities and so on ... all without fighting. He said they wouldn't give a second look at AoE 3, or The Sims 2 ... they just wanted to play AoE 2.
Someone wrote about his entire family playing mostly older games [slashdot.org] (including all Mario games), and mostly avoiding newer, copy-protected games.
It amazes me reading these posts.
Parent
Re:Different "fun" for people (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, like we can generate academic papers automatically, without human intervention. It is called SCIgen. It is readable and understandable, depend on your definition of "Readable" and "Understandable".
Re:Can we? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, Raph Koster [wikipedia.org] defines "fun" and "automatically" as the same thing, since in Star Wars Galaxies he designed in support for AFK macroing your way right up to the end "game" [allakhazam.com].
Parent
Seems credible to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I stopped playing new boardgames as all these become obvious after a few games, and if you tend to like one, old games already implement them perfectly. You basically have 3 (arguably 4) components in any board game : randomness (go play dices if you like it), tactical planning (go play chess), bluffing (go play poker) and, arguably, negotiation that can be seen as a merge between tactics and planning but that often use a whole different range of social skills.
Video games have also some recurring ingredients. I played less of them so I fail to see them more clearly, but some of them are obvious :
- a sentiment of progression. Whether artificial (through leveling in RPG games) or real (from FPS where you get better at shooting, rocket jumping, etc...)
- hidden content of the game, that the player has to find or guess. It is usually some content voluntarily put there by the game developer (quests, levels, maps) some hidden game logic that one must understand (AIs behavior, puzzles, research trees). In the most interesting games (in my humble opinion) there is also content that is almost emergent. The creator only loosely coded some rules and it is the player's actions that create his own problems to solve. It often happens in strategic or development games, where you discover that a design you chose had some vulnerabilities and that by correcting this, you create a whole bunch of new problems.
That one last part is the most difficult to reproduce automatically, in my opinion. But a lot of successful games don't have any such emergent content, so I guess that automated games generation can prove quite fruitful !
I think the research oversimplifies (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, if you define "fun" as "a smooth learning curve", then you can make fun games automatically.
But not all of the fun is in the learning. Some fun is in tweaking humor. Some fun is in triggering a person's likes and dislikes (Nethack, ponies). Some fun is created by changing the venue (is it a space game? a historical shoot-em-up? A politics game?
Yes, there are underlying patterns to a lot of games. But simply limiting our definition of "fun" to "learning" and "follows the pattern" reminds me of the automatic novel generations in Orwell's 1984.
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think that this headline defined the problem well. Yes, some parts of fun can be automatically generated. But no, to make a fun game, it has to be interesting to a human, not just to a turing machine. And for that, you really need other humans to make the games, or you don't have the depth required for real "fun".
Why I disagree on the fact that the automatically generatable parts of fun are not enough to make a human-enjoyable game, I don't really have more counter arguments than there are arguments. That would make for an enjoyable Turing test. My only counter-argument is that I know of quite a few games which do not depend on depth to be fun.
Creating stories (Score:2)
Wasn't there a short story about a computer that created and told stories?
Maybe by Lem?
Not a happy ending. (Ha! My awful memory won't protect you from spoilers!)
Re: (Score:2)
That was Asimov's "Someday" i believe
Not the one I was talking about.
The one I'm trying to remember is about a computer that tells stories so good that they have to send it to space away from humanity (for some reason). Then, when they want to shut it down they can't, because every time an astronaut goes near, he starts receiving the stories and they are so good that he can't bear to destroy the author/computer.
Or something like that.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, that was Stanislaw Lem; one of his Trurl and Klaupacius stories from The Cyberiad. "The First Sally (A), or Trurl's Electronic Bard"
More to the point (Score:5, Funny)
Can we get research grant funding automatically ?
I believe the answer is yes.
1. Choose a 25 year old topic (for example, a Pacmangame), reinvent it using lots of buzzwords such as swarm, hive, collective, competitive, but secretly just program a system using some generic rules, and a gradient descent algorithm that will force those generic rules to conform to the behaviour we wanted in the first place. Then publish a PDF (why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?), and spam it across tech news sites.
2. Make some wild claim that this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius (or similar).
3. ???
4. Profit !
PDF isn't a proprietary format (Score:5, Informative)
PDF has been opened. Admittedly the standards body which supports it is ISO, but I don't think anyone bribed them to approve it.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I find it's hard to believe it's truly open when Microsoft were sued for trying to implement it.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Citation?
(Without knowing anything, my immediate gut feeling would be that they may have gotten sued over intentionally implementing it in a wrong, incompatible fashion, kinda like how they tried with Java in the 90s. THAT would be understandable.)
Re:More to the point (Score:4, Informative)
PDF is documented and can be read and written by open tools. Also it prints the same way every time.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
So presumably those patents on the splash screen are now null and void ? Including the one for the implementation of the LZW algorithm, that they don't even own ?
I fail to see how anything "open" can also be patented ... I mean what would be the point ?
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Informative)
So presumably those patents on the splash screen are now null and void ? Including the one for the implementation of the LZW algorithm, that they don't even own ?
The patent on the LZW algorithm expired over five years ago. You're free to use it for whatever you want now.
Parent
Re:More to the point (Score:5, Insightful)
why oh why by the way is PDF proprietary format ANY better than Microsoft's proprietary format ?
Probably because it addresses a need which hasn't been terribly well addressed by anyone else - providing a platform-independent mechanism to ship around information which you can more-or-less guarantee will look the same to everyone who opens the file, where the file will be hard to edit but easy to create, where the file will look much the same on screen as it will printed out (notwithstanding the limitations of the printer or indeed its driver).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Umm... Mac OS X? Reads PDF quite well, with no external software installed whatsoever.
Windows? Bah!
automawhat? (Score:2, Funny)
ugh.
Perhaps this has a future in game design? (Score:2)
Uhmm, no ? We need versatility in the games we play, and a complexity that such algorithms can't introduce automatically. Sure, such methods could help in creating some (!) game rules, anything more is beyond speculation.
Erorr (Score:2)
Just because a fun game has X learning curve doesn't mean games with X learning curve are fun. The learning curve maintains attention, necessary for the game to be fun. The same learning curve in another situation may maintain attention to something droll. And something fun may have no learning curve at all. I suggest you're not looking at fun, you're looking at ability to maintain engagement. I also suggest fun does not have a single definition, or else everyone would play the same game.
Re: (Score:2)
Dear all-knowing AC: You should respond with an informed rebuke to GP's post, rather than responding with scorn with a poor one-sentence mention of a book only very few have read.
In response to GP, quantifying "fun" (which is required for any automated learning algorithm) indeed isn't easy, but evolving game rules using an expected learning curve isn't a bad idea. Games with a too steep or too shallow learn
Already been done. (Score:2)
The nice thing about this article is that Raph is out spending his time on worthless stuff instead of sending his time creating a high profile game. He is really good at writing papers on how stuff should work but he cannot implement his own ideas.
Work on Hollywood movies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Seeing movies produced by following the "formula", do you want automated games? Do you even want a "formula" for "fun" game design?
Maybe its possible, but this starts to sound like automated art.
Not a chance. (Score:4, Insightful)
If programming and design could be done automatically, we wouldn't still have programmers. We can't even manage to automate creating simple apps. How could we possibly automate creating entire new games, which means new art, new rules, new everything.
On top of that, everyone finds something different in a game to be 'fun'. Some love challenge, some love adventure, some love collecting things... Attempts to make games that have everything anyone could love are usually pathetic flops.
I'll never forget (Score:5, Funny)
Make Game
Racing Game
2 tracks
In a programming IDE did not yield anything.
Off the top of my head (Score:2, Insightful)
fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve.
Best example for this is Chess. Easy to learn but takes many years to master.
Simplicity of form (Score:4, Insightful)
What? (Score:5, Insightful)
game programming would be like photography (Score:4, Interesting)
Defining trickiness (Score:3, Interesting)
Fun for me in games usually means there's always something to do or press. The old 2D games were more like this, but a large reason why I hate modern 3D games, is that there's often lots of sprawling around without really doing much (partially related to the 3D world, but it can be solved with difficulty).
I like the idea of how the article mentions that the algorithm biases towards games which can't just be won randomly. The board game is Go is the ultimate example of this I guess, where there are many *levels* of mastery.
But one has to be careful with this approach. If in a 3D game there's a small opening in (say) a castle wall, and miles around of plain grass, it's pretty easy to solve for a human player, despite the huge searchscape and 'narrow' solution that a computer would find tricky (which would apparently potentially rate as a good 'puzzle').
At the very least, developing models for other human factors such as reaction time, subtlety of graphic elements, and the challenge of pressing certain key combinations, would also be needed before final game automation could be achieved.
This was attempted in a Shmup (Score:3, Interesting)
Evolution SHMUP: http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/games/evolution-shmup [kloonigames.com]
This was an experimental game, where the theory was to see how long a player would remain in a given game - as people continued playing, the system adapted gradually in order to maximize the fun value (in this case, the amount of time spent on a single game.)
This experiment has a smaller search space than the article, but isn't generating any "successful" games. This may be caused by the environment(i.e. the evolution scope is too narrow and thus isn't generating a variety of enemies), but the same problem can easily apply to the article in question.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also completely unrelated to the paper, which explicitly says that they pick a single maze to use for all the games to ensure that it is about evolving the game rather than the maze.
Rickrolling for democracy (Score:2)