Evaluating content generators

Abstract

Evaluating your content generator is a very important task, but difficult to do well. Creating a game content generator in general is much easier than creating a good game content generator—but what is a “good” content generator? That depends very much on what you are trying to create and why. This chapter discusses the importance and the challenges of evaluating content generators, and more generally understanding a generator’s strengths and weaknesses and suitability for your goals. In particular, we discuss two different approaches to evaluating content generators: visualizing the expressive range of generators, and using questionnaires to understand the impact of your generator on the player. These methods could broadly be called top-down and bottom-up methods for evaluating generators.