Video game worlds are getting increasingly large and complex. This poses challenges to the game AI for both pathfinding and strategic decisions, not least in real-time strategy games. One way to alleviate the problem is to manually pre-label the game maps with information about regions and critical choke points, which the game AI can then take advantage of. We present a method for automatically decomposing game maps into non-uniform sized regions. The method uses a flooding algorithm at its core and has the benefit, in addition to its effectiveness, to be relatively intuitive both conceptually and in implementing. Empirical evaluation on game maps shows that the automatic decomposition results in intuitive regions of a comparable standard to human-made labeling. Furthermore, we show that our automatic decomposition, when used by a pathfinding algorithm capable of taking advantage of pre-labeled regions, significantly improves search effectiveness.

This paper introduces a search-based generative process for first person shooter levels. Genetic algorithms evolve the level's architecture and the placement of powerups and player spawnpoints, generating levels with one floor or two floors. The evaluation of generated levels combines metrics collected from simulations of artificial agents competing in the level and theory-based heuristics targeting general level design patterns. Both simulation-based and theory-driven evaluations target player balance and exploration, while resulting levels emergently exhibit several popular design patters of shooter levels.

Mobile digital games are dominantly released under the freemium business model, but only a small fraction of the players makes any purchases. The ability to predict who will make a purchase enables optimization of marketing efforts, and tailoring customer relationship management to the specific user's profile. Here this challenge is addressed via two models for predicting purchasing players, using a 100,000 player dataset: 1) A classification model focused on predicting whether a purchase will occur or not. 2) a regression model focused on predicting the number of purchases a user will make. Both models are presented within a decision and regression tree framework for building rules that are actionable by companies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating purchase decisions in freemium mobile products from a user behavior perspective and adopting behavior-driven learning approaches to this problem.

An open area of research for AI in games is how to provide unique gameplay experiences that present specialized game content to users based on their preferences, in-game actions, or the system's goals. The area of procedural content generation (PCG) focuses on creating or modifying game worlds, assets, and mechanics to generate tailored or personalized game experiences. Similarly, the area of interactive narrative (IN) focuses on creating or modifying story worlds, events, and domains to generate tailored or personalized story experiences. In this paper we describe a game engine that utilizes a PCG pipeline to generate and control a range of gameplay experiences from an underlying IN experience management construct.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been widely used in video games to control non-playable characters. More recently, AI has been applied to automated story generation with the objective of managing the player's experience in an interactive narrative. Such AI experience managers can generate and adapt narrative dynamically, often in response to the player's in-game actions. We implement and evaluate a recently proposed AI experience manager, PACE, which predicts the player's emotional response to a narrative event and uses such predictions to shape the narrative to keep the player on an author-supplied target emotional curve.

Dunyazad is a system which creates narrative choices à la Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. It attempts to generate choices that achieve specific poetic effects. This paper demonstrates Dunyazad’s ability to manage player expectations by having it generate three distinct choice structures: obvious choices, relaxed choices, and dilemmas. Using answer set programming, Dunyazad’s choice generation system directly encodes a theory of choice poetics, so flaws in its output can inform both the system and the theory itself. Survey data presented here thus not only validate that players’ perceptions match Dunyazad’s intentions, but also have implications for the theory of choice poetics. Statistical analysis of our data indicates that Dunyazad can successfully construct obvious choices, relaxed choices, and dilemmas.

We present a rule specification language called Ceptre,intended to enable rapid prototyping for experimental game mechanics, especially in domains that depend on procedural generation and multi-agent simulation. Ceptre can be viewed as an explication of a new methodology for understanding games based on linear logic, a formal logic concerned with resource usage. We present a correspondence between gameplay and proof search in linear logic, building on prior work on generating narratives. In Ceptre, we introduce the ability to add interactivity selectively into a generative model, enabling inspection of intermediate states for debugging and exploration as well as a means of play. We claim that this methodology can support game designers and researchers in designing, anaylzing, and debugging the core systems of their work in generative, multi-agent gameplay. To support this claim, we provide two case studies implemented in Ceptre, one from interactive narrative and one from a strategy-like domain.

There are several approaches in the literature for automatically generating Infinite Mario Bros levels. The evaluation of such approaches is often performed solely with computational metrics such as leniency and linearity. While these metrics are important for an initial exploratory evaluation of the content generated, it is not clear whether they are able to capture the player's perception of the content generated. In this paper we evaluate several of the commonly used computational metrics. Namely, we perform a systematic user study with procedural content generation systems and compare the insights gained from our user study with those gained from analyzing the computational metric values. The results of our experiment suggest that current computational metrics should not be used in lieu of user studies for evaluating content generated by computer programs.

Horror games form a peculiar niche within game design paradigms, as they entertain by eliciting negative emotions such as fear and unease to their audience during play. This genre often follows a specific progression of tension culminating at a metaphorical peak, which is defined by the designer. A player's tension is elicited by several facets of the game, including its mechanics, its sounds, and the placement of enemies in its levels. This paper investigates how designers can control and guide the automated generation of levels and their soundscapes by authoring the intended tension of a player traversing them.

Indexter is a plan-based computational model of narrative discourse which leverages cognitive scientific theories of how events are stored in memory during online comprehension. These discourse models are valuable for static and interactive narrative generation systems because they allow the author to reason about the audience's understanding and attention as they experience a story. A pair of Indexter events can share up to five indices: protagonist , time , space , causality , and intentionality . We present the first in a planned series of evaluations that will explore increasingly nuanced methods of using these indices to predict salience. The Pairwise Event Salience Hypothesis states that when a past event shares one or more indices with the most recently narrated event, that past event is more salient than one which shares no indices with the most recently narrated event. A crowd-sourced (n=200) study of 24 short text stories that control for content, text, and length supports this hypothesis. While this is encouraging, we believe it also motivates the development of a richer model that accounts for intervening events, narrative complexity, and episodic memory decay.