Guest editorial special issue on AI-based and AI-assisted game design

Abstract

AS RESEARCHERS working with games, we are often faced with terms that either lack a definition entirely or which are contested and debated as part of their very nature. Many papers have tried and failed to define what “fun” is, from where “creativity” originates, or what “difficulty” means, for example, and many more papers in the future will try and fail to do the same. Tangling with ineffable concepts, with moving targets and nebulous ideas is all part of the joy of doing artificial intelligence (AI) research in a complex, multifaceted domain like games. “Game design” might be considered another concept that struggles to be pinned down by a single definition, but nonetheless it is a term that is understood and used every day by game developers, critics, academics, and players. Game design is a skill, sense, and practice that infiltrates every aspect of game creation from the visual language of an instruction manual to the specific balancing of a number in an algorithm buried somewhere deep in a system of rules. Game design is an art and a science, it is a precise process as well as something done by feel. One could ask: how can AI ever hope to contribute to something so vast and so multidimensional?