Automated Iterative Game Design

context-specific and universal individual motivations; emotions; beliefs; social norms; and inter-personal relationships using a novel logical formalism. Prom Week[131] includes a “social physics” model that allows authoring individual character traits, feelings, and relationships and enables characters to form intents, take actions, relate to a shared cultural space, and remember and refer to past events. While these tools enable authoring content they provided very limited feedback on how authoring choices may alter potential player behavior in the games. Authoring tools have also been developed to capture other broad classes of games. Puzzlescript4 was designed to facilitate creating puzzle games, using a grammar-like front-end language. The EGGG [149] and Ludi [20] both model a class of adversarial board games. The Machinations [2, 55, 57] and micro-machinations [107, 162] frameworks were designed around modeling arbitrary game economies using Petri Nets as an underlying model and visual authoring tools. Machinations support running simulations of to allow authors to visualize potential runs of a game. BIPED [195] supports authoring game prototypes using the event calculus, allowing for logical checks on possible playouts by using model checking to test whether particular states may hold in the game. Gamelan [150] supports authoring a variety of turn-based board and card games along with the ability to author game ‘critics’ that check for the presence of behaviors in games. Potential behaviors are checked using static analysis of the game code or dynamic analysis based on pre-authored agent behavior patterns. Ceptre [126] models a similar class of games with a grounding in linear logic, supporting checks on game playouts using proofs from the game’s core language. Gamika [157] models a class of simple 2D, physics based games using numeric vectors. These authoring tools readily support human authoring, but have been of limited value for game generation due to their great expressive power—something of value to human creators but an obstacle to computational exploration of the space of games possible with these tools. 4http://www.puzzlescript.net/