Computational Game Creativity - IDG5155

General

This course covers the different creative facets of games (visuals, audio, narrative, game design, level design and gameplay) and algorithms that automate the creation of content in one or more of these facets. Autonomous or semi-autonomous computational creators can alleviate the authorial burden of games during development, can lead to interesting and unexpected gameplay experiences and can provide insights on the nature of human creativity. Computational game creativity is positioned at the intersection of developing fields within games research, such as procedural content generation and AI-assisted design, and long-studied fields, such as visual art and narrative.

The study-unit includes a study of the different game facets from the perspective of human authors, presents the state-of-the art in procedural content generation within games, and connects them to instances of computational or mixed-initiative creativity outside of games (e.g. parametric design in architecture, generative art, procedural audio).

The study-unit will cover the following topics:

theories on human and computational creativity
creative facets of games, from a human and computational creativity perspective (visuals, audio, narrative, level design, game design, gameplay)
human-computer co-creativity and assisted design
multi-facet creativity, in games and beyond

By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

Identify creative facets of games and describe them as computational models.
Theorize on the nature of human and machine creativity, and how they intersect.
Describe and theorize on the algorithms and domains covered in class.
Critically analyze how human creativity affects the creative facets of games.
Evaluate how computer-generated content affects the game it is used on.
Theorize, describe and implement algorithms able to autonomously create game content.

Content from past year's recordings

24 February: Introduction: Computational Creativity Theory and video
3 March: Level Design: Constructive Methods + WORKSHOP and video
10 March: Level Design: Evolutionary Methods + WORKSHOP and github link and video
17 March: Rules & Gameplay: Constraint-based and Surrogate-based Methods + WORKSHOP and video
24 March: Visuals: Main Lecture, Pattern-producing Networks, Generative Adversarial Networks, DeLeNoX and video
14 April: Audio: Main Lecture, RNNs and video
21April: Narrative: Main Lecture, Text generation and video
28 May: Mixed-Initiative & Evaluation: Main Lecture and video

Computational Game Creativity - IDG5155

General

Content from past year's recordings

Further readings