Playable Experiences

2018 Playable Experiences

"Escape Plan" and "At the Bar": Dynamic Characters Driven by Spirit AI Character Engine is a linked pair of playable experiences, representing two conversations with AI-driven characters in a shared fictional universe. (Aaron Reed, Emily Short)

Project Hastur: An Evolutionary Tower Defense Game features procedurally generated enemies that evolve based on the automated defenses erected by the player. (Samantha Heck, Barrie Robison, Landon Wright, Terence Soule)

Vox Populi: The Ustradian Games is a game-based assessment of cross-cultural competency and meta-cognition, that integrates complex simulation technologies with gameplay. (Mike Treanor, Joshua McCoy, Anne Sullivan)

Camelot: An Interactive Narrative Sandbox Environment is a modular and customizable interactive narrative environment, which provides a sandbox to visualize and test different narrative systems. (Alireza Shirvani, Edward Garcia, Rachelyn Farrell, Stephen Ware)

Bottery is a combination of a simulator, language, parser, and IDE for finite state machine chatbots. (Katherine Compton).

Previous Selections

2017

Proofdoku extends classic Sudoku play with an argumentation mechanic and hint systems powered by the AI technology of answer set programming (ASP). (Nicholas Warren, Mason Reed, Adam M. Smith)

Chimeria:Grayscale is an epistolary interactive narrative game that implements a models of sexism in the workplace. (Pablo Ortiz, Laurel Carney, Loren Sherman, Elizabeth Carre, Nadya Vivatvisha, D. Fox Harrell)

Traveler is a voice-controlled interactive audio narrative that exposes players to the dystopian consequences of racial profiling and warrantless border searches. (Paola Mardo, Andrew Gordon).

Unexplored is an action roguelike. Praised for its fantastic content generation, real-time combat and surprising amount of content and depth. (Joris Dormains)

Darwin’s Demons is an arcade style space shooter in which the player battles a population of evolving aliens encoded by digital genomes. (Barry Robison, Spencer Gomez, Samantha Heck, Landon Wright, Terence Soule)

2016

Bad News simulates the history of a small town, down to the level of characters, to seed a live performance. (James Ryan, Ben Samuel, Adam Summerville, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin)

Rogue Process generates fictional corporations and their skyscraper offices. (Michael Cook)

Conceptually Blended Levels in a Unity Engine, a conceptual blending approach that learns about Mario Bros. level designs from data and applies design motifs to new levels. (Matthew Guzdial, Mark Riedl)

Elsinore simulates character knowledge while accounting for time-travel on the part of the player. (Eric Butler, Kristin Siu)

2015

Base Case, a top-down sneaking game by Justus Robertson in which the world is generated from a plan-based experience manager, where the player directly manipulates the planner’s underlying state via in-game mechanisms;

iGiselle, an interactive narrative by Sergio Poo Hernandez in which the player influences an AI experience manager and branching narrative choices by assuming dance positions perceived by the Microsoft Kinect;

Prismata, a unique commercial turn-based digital strategy card game in development by Lunarch Studios, submitted by lead AI programmer Dave Churchill, featuring sophisticated AI opponents navigating a large state-space;

Sarah & Sally, a puzzle-platformer by Martin Cerny with a cooperative AI sidekick that telegraphs its search state in-game, set in a problem space designed to highlight and simplify AI search while creating perceived complexity for the human player;

Sure Footing, an infinite runner building on rhythm-based approaches to real-time procedural level design.

2014

1849, a commercial game which uses an AI-based production-rule system, by Robert Zubek and Matthew Viglione

To That Sect, a game created by ANGELINA – an automated game-creation program written by Michael Cook

The Best Laid Plans, a research prototype that uses an automated planner to drive gameplay, created by Stephen Ware, R. Michael Young, Christian Stith, and Phillip Wright

Everyday Genius: SquareLogic, a commercial puzzle game with smart content generation, created by Ken Harward and Squirrel Eiserloh

PAST: Player-Specific Automated Storytelling, an adaptive text-based game by Alejandro Ramirez-Sanabria and Vadim Bulitko

Penguin Push, a puzzle game with automated content generation by Nathan Sturtevant

Vessel, a commercial game featuring many AI technologies by Kieran Lord, John Krajewski, Martin Farren, Mark Filippelli, and Milenko Tjunic.

2013

Endless Web: Gillian Smith, Alexei Othenin-Girard, Jim Whitehead and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Game-O-Matic: Mike Treanor, Bryan Blackford, Chris DeLeon, Simon Ferrari, Bobby Schweizer, Ian Bogost, and Michael Mateas

Prom Week: Joshua McCoy, Mike Treanor, Benjamin Samuel, Aaron Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas

Storyteller: Dan Benmergui

Third Eye Crime: Damian Isla

Versu: Richard Evans and Emily Short