Boosting Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity in Game Design: A Tutorial

TL;DR

This tutorial provides guidelines and a framework for developing and assessing mixed-initiative co-creative tools in game design, highlighting current patterns, gaps, and future directions in AI-assisted game creation.

Contribution

It introduces the MI-CCy Quantifier framework for evaluating co-creative tools and applies it to analyze existing works, identifying key features and gaps in current approaches.

Findings

Identified prevalent patterns in MI-CCy tools

Developed the MI-CCy Quantifier framework

Highlighted gaps and future research directions

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing application of mixed-initiative co-creative approaches in the creation of video games. The rapid advances in the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) systems further propel creative collaboration between humans and computational agents. In this tutorial, we present guidelines for researchers and practitioners to develop game design tools with a high degree of mixed-initiative co-creativity (MI-CCy). We begin by reviewing a selection of current works that will serve as case studies and categorize them by the type of game content they address. We introduce the MI-CCy Quantifier, a framework that can be used by researchers and developers to assess co-creative tools on their level of MI-CCy through a visual scheme of quantifiable criteria scales. We demonstrate the usage of the MI-CCy Quantifier by applying it to the selected works. This analysis enabled us to discern prevalent patterns within these tools, as well as features that contribute to a higher level of MI-CCy. We highlight current gaps in MI-CCy approaches within game design, which we propose as pivotal aspects to tackle in the development of forthcoming approaches.