Impressions of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft

TL;DR

This paper shares qualitative insights from participants, judges, and organizers of the GDMC AI settlement generation challenge in Minecraft, highlighting experiences, organizational issues, and future directions for PCG competitions.

Contribution

It provides a collection of reflective experiences and feedback from various stakeholders, offering insights into PCG and computational creativity beyond quantitative metrics.

Findings

Participants value creative diversity in AI-generated settlements.

Organizational challenges impact competition fairness and engagement.

Qualitative feedback reveals deeper insights into AI creativity and evaluation.

Abstract

The GDMC AI settlement generation challenge is a PCG competition about producing an algorithm that can create an "interesting" Minecraft settlement for a given map. This paper contains a collection of written experiences with this competition, by participants, judges, organizers and advisors. We asked people to reflect both on the artifacts themselves, and on the competition in general. The aim of this paper is to offer a shareable and edited collection of experiences and qualitative feedback - which seem to contain a lot of insights on PCG and computational creativity, but would otherwise be lost once the output of the competition is reduced to scalar performance values. We reflect upon some organizational issues for AI competitions, and discuss the future of the GDMC competition.