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Knowledge-Level Creativity in Game Design

Adam M. Smith and Michael Mateas

Expressive Intelligence Studio University of California, Santa Cruz

{amsmith,michaelm}@soe.ucsc.edu

Abstract

Drawing on inspirations outside of traditional computa- tional creativity domains, we describe a theoretical ex- planation of creativity in game design as a knowledge seeking process. This process, based on the practices of human game designers and an extended analogy with creativity in science, is amenable to computational rea- lization in the form of a discovery system. Further, the model of creativity it entails, creativity as the rational pursuit of curiosity, suggests a new perspective on ex- isting artifact generation challenges and prompts a new mode of evaluation for creative agents (both human and machine).

Introduction

Paintings (Colton 2008), melodies (Cope 2005), and poems (Hartman 1996) are familiar domains for artifact genera- tion in computational creativity (CC), and much estab- lished theory in the field is focused on evaluating such artifacts and the systems that produce them. In this paper, we draw inspiration for a new understanding of creativity from the less familiar (but no less creative) domain of game design. In its full generality, game design overlaps visual art, music, and other areas where there are many existing results, but where it stands apart is in its unavoid- ably deep, active interaction with the audience: in gamep- lay.

Crafting gameplay is the central focus of game design (Fullerton 2008). Play, however, is not an artifact to be generated directly. Instead, it is a result that emerges from

the design of the formal rule system at the core of every

game (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, chapter 12), a machine driven by external player actions.

Where, in visual art, we might judge the creativity (as

novelty and value) of an artifact on the basis of the workrsquo;s similarity to known pieces and its affective qualities

(Pease, Winterstein and Colton 2001), it is not so easy to

make direct statements about the properties of the artifacts in game design. Desirable games are celebrated for their

innovative gameplay or the fun experiences they enable–

these are properties of the artifactrsquo;s interaction with the audience, not of the artifact itself. The focus on predomi-

nantly passive artifacts in CC, those which can be appre-

ciated via direct inspection rather than through interactive execution, has masked what is obvious in game design: that the desirability of artifacts is in their relationship to their environment.

Armed with such an understanding, we seek a theoreti- cal explanation of creativity in game design–not the engi- neering application of established design knowledge, but the rarer experimentation that realizes new forms of ga- meplay and original player experiences. This theory should speak to both the artifacts and processes of game design, and do so in a way that meaningfully explains game design as done by humans as well as computational means. To- wards capturing the richness of existing human design ac- tivity, we are most interested in a theory of transforma- tional creativity (Boden 2004) that explains how designers build new conceptual spaces of game designs and reshape them in response to feedback experiences observing play.

We introduce a new theoretical model that is amenable to computational realization which describes creative game design as a knowledge-seeking process (a kind of active

learning). Our broader contribution, creativity as the ra-

tional pursuit of curiosity, can provide an explanation of and suggest new questions for applications in traditional

CC artifact generation domains.

In the following sections we will review established game design practices, draw an analogy between game

design and scientific discovery, review and apply Newellrsquo;s

concept of the knowledge level, and then introduce our model of creativity. Finally we will conclude with a dis-

cussion of the implications of this theory for game design

and the larger CC context.

Game Design Practices

In a standard text, Salen and Zimmerman (2004, p. 168) introduce the “second-order” problem of game design bluntly:

“The goal of game design is meaningful play, but play is something that emerges from the functioning of the rules. As a game designer, you can never directly design

play. You can only design the rules that give rise to it.

Game designers create experience, but only indirectly.” Play includes the objective choices made by a player and

the conditions achieved in the game, along with the play-

errsquo;s subjective reactions and expectations. At this point, it is straight forward to adopt the first tenet of our theory of creative game design: game designers are really designers of play.

The idea of adopting an iterative, “playcentric” (Fuller- ton 2008) design process, in which games are continually tested to better understand their emergent (play) properties, is corroborated by others like Schell (2008), who further describes the supreme importance of “listening” in the de- sign process (being able to process feedback from the playerrsquo;s experience of candidate designs). Beyond initial conceptualization of a game idea and tuning and polish of the final product, the two most important practices of game design are prototyping and playtesting, both of which are intentionally focused on providing the designer with a bet- ter understanding of play.

Prototypes are playable artifacts, working models of a game idea that permit asking and answering questions about how a game will interact with its environment with- out requiring the effort to create a complete

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