Experimental AI In Games, Day 2
Just like yesterday, we had seven different paper talks, each grouped broadly into 3 different categories. Unlike yesterday, two of the presentations were delivered via
Procedural Content Generation
Mixed Reality and Procedural Content Generation in Video (Sasha Azad, Carl Saldanha, Cheng Hann Gan and Mark Riedl)
Intelligent Physiotherapy Through Procedural Content Generation (Tommy Thompson and Shabnam Esfahlani)
I’ll be honest, calling these papers simply PCG is doing them a bit of disservice - they, specifically, are PCG for Augmented/Virtual reality, and both are taking different approaches to the problem. While neither of these papers are necessarily in my domain persay, there’s a lot of really interesting game design questions that they both alternately raise and solve with their systems.
Theories
Proceduralist Readings, Procedurally (Chris Martens, Adam Summerville, Michael Mateas, Joseph Osborn, Sarah Harmon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Arnav Jhala)
Computatrum Personae: Toward a Role-Based Taxonomy of (Computationally Assisted) Performance(Benjamin Samuel, James Ryan, Adam Summerville, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
The Proceduralist Readings paper was something I found super interesting - the notion of using ASP to automatically derive meaning from a game was never something that I would have thought up, but am super glad to see that it happened, and it gave me an excuse to think about how to ground out styles into meanings. The other paper was an interesting taxonomy of performative semi-computational systems, which was also super cool, even merely on the level of “wow I didn’t even know that many of these systems existed”
Platformers (aka Mario)
What Does Bach Have in Common withWorld 1-1: Automatic Platformer Gestalt Analysis (Johnathan Pagnutti)
Learning Player Tailored Content From Observation: Platformer Level Generation from Video Traces using LSTMs (Adam Summerville, Matthew Guzdial, Michael Mateas and Mark Riedl)
Deep Static and Dynamic Level Analysis: A Study on Infinite Mario (Matthew Guzdial, Nathan Sturtevant and Boyang Li)
And finally, this wouldn’t be a games conference if we didn’t have a whole boat load of papers about Mario. Again, not really my wheel house, but I definitely enjoyed all of the presentations.
Tomorrow brings another day, and the full AIIDE conference!