What is a roguelike?Many players ask this question and receive a common answer: a roguelike is a video game that includes procedurally generated levels and permadeath.However, this definition assumes a taxonomist paradigm, prioritizing what elements are present in a game rather than the question of why those elements are present.In this paper, we examine 1) the historical formation of the roguelike genre, 2) the creation of its namesake, Rogue, 3) the establishment of the genre's first formal definition, The Berlin Interpretation, and 4) the gradual manifestation of The Modern Interpretation.Further, we present a new genre term-the Prepare to Die game, or PTD, defined by the question: what makes death meaningful in games?We argue that the commonly cited elements of procedurally generated levels and permadeath are merely tools to achieve variance in play and meaningful consequences for player actions.This shift in framing presents a holistic perspective that highlights experiential architecture and developer motivations, better aligning with the dynamic nature of genre.Further, we propose a descriptive set of vocabulary that can be used to craft inclusive genre descriptions that prioritize design philosophies shaping the very experience of video games.

As the game industry expands, an increasing number of students and hobbyists are entering the game development field, eager to create their own titles. However, there is a lack of structured training programs that effectively prepare them for industry demands. Games convey meaningful messages through stories, assets, and mechanics, yet how early-stage developers make creative decisions while building production skills remains unclear. We explored skill development and cultural representation in game design during a 10-week professional development program at MassDigi with early-stage developers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Our findings reveal three observed strategies as themes through which developers incorporate their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds into game development to achieve cultural representation, as well as four themes that address developers' skill set improvement and personal growth during this process. We recommend structuring programs by considering these themes to enhance self-expressive game design and support skill development through a peer learning community.

This paper presents a study that examines tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) players' understanding, attitudes, and perceptions of generative AI (GAI) as it intersects with this creative, hobbyist domain. While general findings regarding challenges and potential harms of GAI are well-explored, much of this exploration centers workplaces concerned with productivity and efficiency. This study values the contrast provided by TTRPG hobbyists in the relatively underexplored domain of a non-professional, creative community that tends to lack corporate pressures. Through a qualitative study using ethnographic interviews and a shared image-generation activity, we explore how TTRPG hobbyists are responding to GAI systems in this environment and describe our participants' mental model of GAI ecosystems. We found that they tend to treat GAI as its own creative medium, using vocabulary attentive to distinct design affordances of GAI systems rather than seeing it simply as a “tool”. Further, we develop the term "creative ethos" to describe how research participants evaluate and navigate such affordances to align with ethical values of creativity fostered by TTRPGs, especially focusing on participants’ aspirations to support artists and resist unethical GAI futures.

Wright’s notion of "organic creative space" invites viewers to experience the harmony and discord inherent when operating at the boundary between the natural and designed worlds. In this artwork, we interrogate similar boundaries: between the natural and artificial, and between the creative and the generative. We explore the use of artificial intelligence systems to generate images of natural phenomena–specifically, women’s faces–and the discomfort felt by viewers as they are unsettled by the unanticipated. The Matrix of Discomfort is a multimedia art installation that blends quilting and augmented reality (AR) to critically reflect upon AI as a medium that holds promise and distrust, and that exists at boundaries: between the natural and artificial, the creative and the generative, the digital and the physical. It reimagines the quilt, traditionally a feminized symbol of comfort and relaxation, as a canvas for stimulating conversation about the ethical quandaries and potential promises of generative AI.

This paper presents a study that examines developer perceptions and usage of generative AI (GAI) in a summer professional development program for game development interns focused on mobile game design. GAI applications are in common usage worldwide, yet the impacts of this technology in game development remain relatively underexplored. Through a qualitative study using ethnographic interviews and participatory observation, this paper explores how GAI impacted the workflows, creative processes, and professional identities of early career game developers. We present a case of GAI integration that was not a straightforward adoption. Focusing on the interns’ resistance, negotiation, and reimagining, we show that the interns were actively developing a new professional culture both with and against generative AI. For the interns, their ethical commitments to fellow game developers and the future of their profession were as important as their practical concerns about usability, utility, and efficacy of GAI tools.

Game companies and degree-granting colleges with game design programs create numerous games annually, with lessons learned from the development process holding significance for developers and game developer communities. Usually, game developers write postmortems to reflect on what went right and wrong in their game development process. Existing studies on video game postmortems have been primarily of games from professional studios that take years of development effort. Our work analyzes 36 student-created game postmortems spanning 9 years, all for mobile games shipped after 3-month development cycles in a summer internship program organized by the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDigi). We identify common themes and topics in these student postmortems and contribute to a greater understanding of student game-creation practices and project-based learning for game education.

This experience report details the pedagogical approach and curriculum for an introductory programming course for non-majors that combines creative coding, ungrading, and project-based learning, with typical enrollment between 120-140 students. Through a series of skills labs, a term-long group project, and regular self-evaluation milestones, students both build their confidence and motivation to learn programming, as well as typical introductory programming skills. Key to the course's success is the integration of project-based learning with a self-evaluation approach to ungrading. In this paper, I present the design of the course, the underlying pedagogical approach leading to course design decisions, and offer resources for adopting this approach in similar CS1 courses. The paper closes with discussion reflecting on the experiences observed throughout teaching this course, and suggests that the approach of blending ungrading with project-based learning shows promise as an inherently flexible course design that supports student wellbeing, confidence, and motivation.

In this article, we introduce the concept of procedural content generation via knowledge transformation (PCG-KT), a new lens and framework for characterizing PCG methods and approaches in which content generation is enabled by the process of knowledge transformation: transforming knowledge derived from one domain in order to apply it in another. Our work is motivated by a substantial number of recent PCG works that focus on generating novel content via repurposing derived knowledge. Such works have involved, for example, performing transfer learning on models trained on one game's content to adapt to another game's content, as well as recombining different generative distributions to blend the content of two or more games. Such approaches arose in part due to limitations in PCG via machine learning, such as producing generative models for games lacking training data and generating content for entirely new games. In this article, we categorize such approaches under this new lens of PCG-KT by offering a definition and framework for describing such methods and surveying existing works using this framework. Finally, we conclude by highlighting open problems and directions for future research in this area.

Standard power wheelchair training is considered inadequate by clinicians and users due to insufficient means to evaluate user performance in varying environments. Virtual environment training offers a promising alternative by providing users with more practical opportunities while reducing the time demands on clinicians. However, there is a need to further explore and optimize game design elements and strategies to ensure engaging and effective training experiences for a diverse range of users. This paper presents our progress of WheelUp!, an open-source electric wheelchair virtual reality (VR) simulator. The simulator offers modularity for clinician-controlled difficulty adjustment, immediate visual and audio feedback, and a visualization tool to aid in clinical assessment and monitoring of progress. This is the first step to building an interactive platform to address the inadequacy of wheelchair training.

Students are often tasked in engaging with activities where they have to learn skills that are tangential to the learning outcomes of a course, such as learning a new software. The issue is that instructors may not have the time or the expertise to help students with such tangential learning. In this paper, we explore how AI-generated feedback can provide assistance. Specifically, we study this technology in the context of a constructionist curriculum where students learn about experimental research through the creation of a gamified experiment. The AI-generated feedback gives a formative assessment on the narrative design of student-designed gamified experiments, which is important to create an engaging experience. We find that students critically engaged with the feedback, but that responses varied among students. We discuss the implications for AI-generated feedback systems for tangential learning.

In this paper, we explore the use of brain-computer interface (BCI)-adapted visual effects to support atmosphere in a walking simulator, and investigate its impact on player-reported immersive experience. While players were using a keyboard or joystick controller to control the basic movement of a character, their mental state was accessed by a non-invasive BCI technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to implicitly adjust the visual effects. Specifically, when less brain activity is detected, the players’ in-game vision becomes blurry and distorted, recreating the impression of losing focus. With this biological indication, we designed a BCI-controlled game, in which the vision becomes blurry and distorted when less brain activity is detected, recreating the impression of losing focus. To analyze the player’s experience, we conducted a within-subjects study where participants played both a BCI-controlled and non-BCI-controlled game and completed a questionnaire after each session. We then conducted a semi-structured interview to investigate player perceptions of the impact the BCI had on their experiences. The results showed that players had slightly improved immersion in the BCI-adaptive game, with the temporal dissociation score significantly different. Players also reported the BCI-adaptive visual effects are realistic and natural, and they enjoyed using BCI as a supplemental control.

The systemic, mathematical, and procedural underpinnings of quilting make the domain a useful metaphor for introductory Computer Science (CS) education, although it is currently used primarily in K-16 educational settings. Considering informal CS education for adult women, we examine the potential depth of this metaphor by exploring how skilled craftspeople engage with and understand quilting-as-metaphor in the context of CS education. In this paper we report the findings of our first focus group with quilters to compare their perceptions and experiences related to quilting and CS. We identified six common themes in how quilters relate the two domains: innate versus learned skills, computing skills as an aid to personal expression, avoiding computing, time investment and tangible rewards, community influence on motivation and learning, and systematic prejudice and its effects. We elaborate upon our findings and discuss potential applications to the design of educational technologies that integrate craft and computation.

In order to advance the field of procedural content generation, and transfer knowledge from academic research to everyday use, we need to develop tools that make generative systems easier to understand and control. In this article, we introduce Danesh, a plugin to the unity game development environment, which helps provide a suite of tools that provide automation or analysis of different aspects of procedural generators. We describe here the features of Danesh, including automatic analysis of generated content, the visualization of generative spaces, automatic parameter discovery, and interface smoothing. We also provide reflections on our development of the tool so far.

IoT firmware oftentimes incorporates third-party components, such as network-oriented middleware and media encoders/decoders. These components consist of large and mature codebases, shipping with a variety of non-critical features. Feature bloat increases code size, complicates auditing/debugging, and reduces stability. This is problematic for IoT devices, which are severely resource-constrained and must remain operational in the field for years. Unfortunately, identification and complete removal of code related to unwanted features requires familiarity with codebases of interest, cumbersome manual effort, and may introduce bugs. We address these difficulties by introducing PRAT, a system that takes as input the codebase of software of interest, identifies and maps features to code, presents this information to a human analyst, and removes all code belonging to unwanted features. PRAT solves the challenge of identifying feature-related code through a novel form of differential dynamic analysis and visualizes results as user-friendly feature graphs . Evaluation on diverse codebases shows superior code removal compared to both manual feature deactivation and state-of-art debloating tools, and generality across programming languages. Furthermore, a user study comparing PRAT to manual code analysis shows that it can significantly simplify the feature identification workflow.

We are developing quilt design generation software for Code Crafters workshops, which aim to broaden public awareness of computational thinking and build links between computer science and quilting. The software generates quilt designs, which will be manipulated and modified by workshop participants. Due to COVID, our workshops will be conducted remotely, so the software has been designed to increase the sense of community by providing opportunities for the types of social interactions that take place in colocated quilting workshops.

Game design is increasingly used in modern education to foster Computational Thinking (CT). Yet, it is unclear how and if the game genre of student-designed games impact CT and programming. We explore how game genre impacts CT development and programming routines in Scratch games designed by 8th-grade students using a metrics-based approach (i.e., Dr. Scratch). Our findings show that designing particular games (e.g., action, storytelling) impact CT and programming development. We observe, for instance, that CT skills develop and consolidate fast, after which students can focus on aspects more specific to game design. Based on the results, we suggest that researchers and educators in constructionist learning consider the impact of game genre when designing game-based curricula for the learning of programming and CT.

Computational thinking (CT) is key to digital literacy and helps develop problem-solving skills, which are fundamental in modern school. As game design shows potential for teaching CT, metrics like Dr. Scratch emerge that help scholars systematically assess the CT of student-designed games, particularly with Scratch. Compared to other CT metrics, Dr. Scratch scores the CT of Scratch projects automatically and can be used to describe CT development. However, previous research using Dr. Scratch summatively assessed CT, but did not look at CT development. We use Dr. Scratch to assess the CT development of Scratch games designed by 8th-grade students in STEM curricula. We show how CT proficiency in student-designed games develops differently in each CT dimension, where parallelism, synchronization, and logic develop proficiently, while developing abstraction seems hard. We discuss insights into game-based CT development for STEM, and suggest improvements for metric-based CT assessment.

Machine learning advances have afforded an increase in algorithms capable of creating art, music, stories, games, and more. However, it is not yet well-understood how machine learning algorithms might best collaborate with people to support creative expression. To investigate how practicing designers perceive the role of AI in the creative process, we developed a game level design tool for Super Mario Bros.-style games with a built-in AI level designer. In this paper we discuss our design of the Morai Maker intelligent tool through two mixed-methods studies with a total of over one-hundred participants. Our findings are as follows: (1) level designers vary in their desired interactions with, and role of, the AI, (2) the AI prompted the level designers to alter their design practices, and (3) the level designers perceived the AI as having potential value in their design practice, varying based on their desired role for the AI.

Most generative systems built in game development are parameter-driven, but the relationship between parameters and the output of the system is often unclear. This makes them frustrating to use for both experts and novices, and as a result generators are often filtered post-hoc, or tweaked through time-consuming trial and error. In this paper we introduce two analytical techniques: smoothness and codependence. We show how these features help analyse the impact of a parameter change on a generative system and suggest ways this could feed back into more intelligent tools that make working with procedural generators more precise and pleasant.

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As the narrative becomes more structurally complex, due to choice-based branching and other player actions, designers need to employ commensurately capable models and visualizations to keep track of that growing complexity. However, previous models of interactive narrative have failed to fully capture interactive elements with automated, operationalized visualizations. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for automated construction of a framework-driven, graph-based representation of interactive narrative. This representation more fully and transparently models structural and interactive features of the narrative than did prior approaches. We present an initial evaluation of this representation, based on modified cognitive walkthroughs performed by interactive narrative design and research experts from our research team, and we describe the takeaways for future improvement on interactive narrative modeling and analysis.

In this paper, we seek to extend the definition and scope of discourse surrounding creative games and play by looking outside the communities traditionally represented in the conception of "gamer" and game studies. Through an examination of games popular in craft communities, particularly that of the textile craft spaces dominated by women, we propose a new model for merging craft play with existing representations and understanding of "craft" and craft systems as a part of gaming. Drawing upon the community-oriented, challenge-centered models we discuss in this paper, we offer potential avenues for game designers to pursue inclusive, feminist design and rethinking creative modalities of play.

While scholarly interest typically focuses on what student designers learn from creating digital games, there has been little investigation into what student designers make. This paper analyzes what design patterns emerge within a set of games from student designers who were instructed to design educational games about climate change using a particular design tool called Scratch. In this preliminary investigation, 19 games are analyzed using the triadic game design framework, which explores relationships between the topic (Reality), learning goal (Meaning) and genre (Play) of serious games. Here we suggest that these decisions fell into a few prototypical patterns, and suggest further paths of inquiry into students' designs regarding considering students' experience with games and supporting the representation of abstract concepts.

eBee is a game that integrates quilting and soft circuits with the goal of bridging the disparate communities of making and crafting through intergenerational play. In this paper, we describe the design process for eBee and our goals for bringing the social, creative, and cooperative values associated with the quilting community to a new kind of game experience. Using an affordance-driven game design process, we identify a new space of potential games that is ripe for exploration.

Presenting levels commensurate with players' current understanding of game mechanics and level design is a significant challenge in designing games. Often game designers create levels by hand intending for the levels to increase in difficulty over the the course of the game while relying on their intuition or extensive user feedback, reiteration, and testing. Instead, this study starts from a number of procedurally generated levels originally generated by parameters expected to encourage a good difficulty progression and then presented to players during playtests. A number of AI-bots with different characteristics were then designed to assess the difficulty of each level. These findings are then compared with player data. Our findings show that bots encapsulating idealized player strategies can help us create a richer model of level difficulty that then reveals useful information about player struggles and learning across level progressions.

Generative systems embody and promote values through their design. This position paper discusses common values in existing PCG systems and suggests alternate, contrasting values that could lead to new kinds of PCG research and practice. There is a need for criticality and awareness of the values we embed in our work, and for consciously reflecting upon our shared values as a community.

Computer Science (CS) education at the middle school level using educational games has seen recent growth and shown promising results. Typically these games teach the craft of programming and not the perspectives required for computational thinking, such as abstraction and algorithm design, characteristic of a CS curriculum. This research presents a game designed to teach computational thinking via the problem of minimum spanning trees to middle school students, a set of evaluation instruments, and the results of an experimental pilot study. Results show a moderate increase in minimum spanning tree performance; however, differences between gender, collaboration method, and game genre preference are apparent. Based on these results, we discuss design considerations for future CS educational games focused on computational thinking.

Games that use procedural content generation (PCG) do so in a wide variety of ways and for different reasons. One of the most common reasons cited by PCG system creators and game designers is improving replayability by providing a means for automatically creating near-infinite amounts of content, the player can come back and replay the game and refine her strategies over a long period. However, this notion of replayability is both overly broad and incomplete as a motivation. This paper contributes an analytical framework and associated common vocabulary for understanding the role of PCG in games from a design standpoint, with an aim of unpacking some of the broad justifications for PCG use in games, and bringing together technical concerns in designing PCG systems with design concerns related to creating engaging playable experiences.

This paper describes the creation of the game Endless Web, a 2D platforming game in which the player's actions determine the ongoing creation of the world she is exploring. Endless Web is an example of a PCG-based game: it uses procedural content generation (PCG) as a mechanic, and its PCG system, Launchpad, greatly influenced the aesthetics of the game. All of the player's strategies for the game revolve around the use of procedural content generation. Many design challenges were encountered in the design and creation of Endless Web, for both the game and modifications that had to be made to Launchpad. These challenges arise largely from a loss of fine-grained control over the player's experience; instead of being able to carefully craft each element the player can interact with, the designer must instead craft algorithms to produce a range of content the player might experience. In this paper we provide a definition of PCG-based game design and describe the challenges faced in creating a PCG-based game. We offer our solutions, which impacted both the game and the underlying level generator, and identify issues which may be particularly important as this area matures.

This paper presents lessons learned from five years of teaching a game design and programming outreach course. This class is taught over the course of a month to high school students participating in the California Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Over these five years we have changed everything in the course, from the overall project structure to the programming language used in the class. In this paper we discuss our successes and failures, and offer recommendations to instructors offering similar courses.

In this paper, we describe a video game design and programming class offered as part of the California Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program at University of California, Santa Cruz. The authors have co-taught this class for four years, and have had an opportunity to iteratively explore a number of approaches in teaching the class. The course has evolved a great deal over the last four years; this paper presents a post-mortem of the program so far, describes our different approaches, and provides insight into the game design process for students.

The Level Generation Competition, part of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS)-sponsored 2010 Mario AI Championship, was to our knowledge the world's first procedural content generation competition. Competitors participated by submitting level generators - software that generates new levels for a version of Super Mario Bros tailored to individual players' playing style. This paper presents the rules of the competition, the software used, the scoring procedure, the submitted level generators, and the results of the competition. We also discuss what can be learned from this competition, both about organizing procedural content generation competitions and about automatically generating levels for platform games. The paper is coauthored by the organizers of the competition (the first three authors) and the competitors.

Tanagra is a mixed-initiative tool for level design, allowing a human and a computer to work together to produce a level for a 2-D platformer. An underlying, reactive level generator ensures that all levels created in the environment are playable, and provides the ability for a human designer to rapidly view many different levels that meet their specifications. The human designer can iteratively refine the level by placing and moving level geometry, as well as through directly manipulating the pacing of the level. This paper presents the design environment, its underlying architecture that integrates reactive planning and numerical constraint solving, and an evaluation of Tanagra's expressive range.

Launchpad is an autonomous level generator that is based on a formal model of 2-D platformer level design. Levels are built out of small segments called “rhythm groups,” which are generated using a two-tiered, grammar-based approach. These segments are pieced together into complete levels that are then rated according to a set of design heuristics. Generation can be controlled using a set of parameters that influence the level pacing and geometry. The approach minimizes the amount of content that must be manually authored: instead of piecing together large segments of a level, Launchpad uses base components that are commonly found in a number of 2-D platformers. Launchpad produces an impressive variety of levels which are all guaranteed to be playable.

Tanagra is a prototype mixed-initiative design tool for 2D platformer level design, in which a human and computer can work together to produce a level. The human designer can place constraints on a continuously running level generator, in the form of exact geometry placement and manipulation of the level's pacing. The computer then fills in the rest of the level with geometry that guarantees playability, or informs the designer that there is no level that meets their requirements. This paper presents the design of Tanagra, a discussion of the editing operations it provides to the designer, and an evaluation of the expressivity of its generator.

We present a rhythm-based method for the automatic generation of levels for 2D platformers, where the rhythm is that which the player feels with his hands while playing. Levels are created using a grammar-based method: first generating rhythms, then generating geometry based on those rhythms. Generation is constrained by a set of style parameters tweakable by a human designer. The approach also minimizes the amount of content that must be manually authored, instead relying on geometry components that are included in the level designer's tileset and a set of jump types. Our results show that this method produces an impressive variety of levels, all of which are fully playable.