Orchestrating game generation

Abstract

The design process is often characterized by and realized through the iterative steps of evaluation and refinement. When the process is based on a single creative domain such as visual art or audio production, designers primarily take inspiration from work within their domain and refine it based on their own intuitions or feedback from an audience of experts from within the same domain. What happens, however, when the creative process involves more than one creative domain such as in a digital game? How should the different domains influence each other so that the final outcome achieves a harmonized and fruitful communication across domains? How can a computational process orchestrate the various computational creators of the corresponding domains so that the final game has the desired functional and aesthetic characteristics? To address these questions, this paper identifies game facet orchestration as the central challenge for artificial-intelligence-based game generation, discusses its dimensions, and reviews research in automated game generation that has aimed to tackle it. In particular, we identify the different creative facets of games, propose how orchestration can be facilitated in a top-down or bottom-up fashion, review indicative preliminary examples of orchestration, and conclude by discussing the open questions and challenges ahead.