Gillian Smith

Understanding procedural content generation: a design-centric analysis of the role of PCG in games

Games that use procedural content generation (PCG) do so in a wide variety of ways and for different reasons. One of the most common reasons cited by PCG system creators and game designers is improving replayability by providing a means for automatically creating near-infinite amounts of content, the player can come back and replay the game and refine her strategies over a long period. However, this notion of replayability is both overly broad and incomplete as a motivation. This paper contributes an analytical framework and associated common vocabulary for understanding the role of PCG in games from a design standpoint, with an aim of unpacking some of the broad justifications for PCG use in games, and bringing together technical concerns in designing PCG systems with design concerns related to creating engaging playable experiences.

Mixed-initiative content creation

Algorithms can generate game content, but so can humans. And while PCG algorithms can generate some kinds of game content remarkably well and extremely quickly, some other types (and aspects) of game content are still best made by humans. Can we combine the advantages of procedural generation and human creation somehow? This chapter discusses mixed-initiative systems for PCG, where both humans and software have agency and co-create content. A small taxonomy is presented of different ways in which humans and algorithms can collaborate, and then three mixed-initiative PCG systems are discussed in some detail: Tanagra, Sentient Sketchbook, and Ropossum.

Threadsteading : Playful Interaction for Textile Fabrication Devices

Our interaction -- Threadsteading -- combines game design practices, traditional crafting techniques of quilting and embroidery, and existing fabrication technologies to produce an innovative game experience that results in a tangible artifact at the end of play. Threadsteading offers a glimpse at a future in which humans can engage in realtime, playful interaction with fabrication machines.

Opening the Black Box of Play: Strategy Analysis of an Educational Game

A significant issue in research on educational games lies in evaluating their educational impact. Although game analytics is often leveraged in the game industry, it can also provide insight into player actions, strategy development, and the learning process in educational games separate from external evaluation measures. This paper explores the potential of game analytics for learning by analyzing player strategies of an educational game that is designed to support algorithmic thinking. We analyze player strategies from nine cases in our data, combining quantitative and qualitative game analysis techniques: hierarchical player clustering, game progression visualizations, playtraces, and think-aloud data. Results suggest that this combination of data analysis techniques provides insights into level progression and learning strategies that may have been otherwise overlooked.

Designing craft games

C design. Doing so allows us to explore new kinds of playable experiences, uncover new methods for interacting with fabrication technologies, and interrogate the stereotypes associated with both games and craft. Craft is a constructive, social, and creative form of play that has become increasingly feminized. In contrast, games are traditionally masculinized and stereotyped as featuring conflict-heavy, destructive play. The demographics of game players are in fact more diverse, with men and women playing in roughly equal numbers; however, games are still widely seen as made by men for men. Integrating games and crafts therefore provides an opportunity for interrogating and disrupting gendered assumptions around craft and play. At a time when augmented and virtual reality are gaining popularity, the emerging genre of craft game, with its focus on combining the digital and physical, is an interesting addition to the games landscape. Here we present lessons learned from designing three craft games that merge sewing and game design. Addies Patchwork Playground is a digital game that uses a quilt as a controller; eBee is a board game built using quilted components; and Threadsteading is a Computer games and traditional handcrafts are seemingly disparate domains, but they share the common property of being inherently playful. Though the playfulness associated with games is obvious, crafting promotes a different kind of play. Hobbyists and professional crafters alike refer to experimentation with color, material, and layout choices as a form of play and find the loosely structured activity both enjoyable and rewarding. The growth of physical computing and digital fabrication creates opportunities to merge crafting activity with electronic and digital game

Design of Playful Authoring Tools for Social and Behavioral Science

Playful environments are increasingly being used for conducting research. This makes a game platform for authoring research studies and teaching about how to conduct research a necessary progression. In this paper, we discuss Mad Science, a playful platform that is being created to allow users to create behavioral experiments. We discuss iterations of the authoring tools, including lessons learned, and the need for AI assistance to guide and teach users.

Mixed-Initiative Creative Interfaces

Enabled by artificial intelligence techniques, we are witnessing the rise of a new paradigm of computational creativity support: mixed-initiative creative interfaces put human and computer in a tight interactive loop where each suggests, produces, evaluates, modifies, and selects creative outputs in response to the other. This paradigm could broaden and amplify creative capacity for all, but has so far remained mostly confined to artificial intelligence for game content generation, and faces many unsolved interaction design challenges. This workshop therefore convenes CHI and game researchers to advance mixed-initiative approaches to creativity support.

Designing eBee : a reflection on quilt-based game design

eBee is a game that integrates quilting and soft circuits with the goal of bridging the disparate communities of making and crafting through intergenerational play. In this paper, we describe the design process for eBee and our goals for bringing the social, creative, and cooperative values associated with the quilting community to a new kind of game experience. Using an affordance-driven game design process, we identify a new space of potential games that is ripe for exploration.

Design Insights into the Creation and Evaluation of a Computer Science Educational Game

Computer Science (CS) education at the middle school level using educational games has seen recent growth and shown promising results. Typically these games teach the craft of programming and not the perspectives required for computational thinking, such as abstraction and algorithm design, characteristic of a CS curriculum. This research presents a game designed to teach computational thinking via the problem of minimum spanning trees to middle school students, a set of evaluation instruments, and the results of an experimental pilot study. Results show a moderate increase in minimum spanning tree performance; however, differences between gender, collaboration method, and game genre preference are apparent. Based on these results, we discuss design considerations for future CS educational games focused on computational thinking.

Standing on the Shoulders of Citizens: Exploring Gameful Collaboration for Creating Social Experiments

There exists a gap in knowledge between scientists and the larger non-scientist public. Therefore, much of the information provided to the public regarding research that should influence their decisions is often misunderstood. In order to eliminate, or at the very least, minimize this gap, there is a need to educate non-scientists about research methods and experimental design. In order to address this need, we have created a digital game, Mad Science, that allows non-scientists to create and participate in experiments to better understand research methods. The current study analyses the results of a paper prototyping session, where non-scientists were asked to create experiments using the tools and scaffolding provided in the game. Participants were able to create playable scenarios and testable experiments. However, our results suggest a need for further AI support and scaffolding to address common areas of confusion and to facilitate the experimental design process.