The Road Less Travelled: Trying And Failing To Generate Walking Simulators

It overlaps with computational creativity as well as procedural content generation, and has roots stretching back long before digital games research had begun in the form we know it today [9]. In [6] Cook and Smith offer a critique of the field, suggesting that the history of AGD research, at the time of writing in 2015, was primarily focused on the generation of rules for games, and limited to goal-oriented games with clear objective functions for winning. They write: This mechanics-first view on games is unnecessarily limiting, stifling the creative potential for AGD and restricting the kinds of games that can be automatically designed to ones that have well-defined, simple rule systems. More than half a decade on from the publication of this work, and most of its points still hold true of AGD research today. This is not in itself a flaw in the research being done - it is still valuable, and the field is progressing and creating many new and exciting systems [1, 11]. Yet there remains a need to expand beyond this, to create the "new kinds of play experience" that Cook and Smith talk about, to expand the horizons of AGD as a research field, and most importantly to expand the scope of how AI interacts with, improves and changes games as a creative medium.