Talk to Me About Pong: On Using Conversational Interfaces for Mixed-Initiative Game Design

Mixed-initiative game design tools combine intelligent agents and human input as collaboration to create novel and interesting content. Traditionally, these systems utilize graphical control-based interfaces. These interfaces can be complex and not reflective of designer intent. Given these issues we propose exploring conversational interfaces for mixed-initiative game design tools. We propose a case-study involving a system for co-creating variations of the game Pong as an initial step towards the exploration of the topic. In addition, we present some of the issues involving the design and implementation of conversational interfaces in mixed-initiative game design tools.