Content Generation
The content generation group seeks to make large, real-world impact on issues surrounding automatic content generation for games. We hope to reduce the authorial burden and facilitate creativity in content generation by providing developers with tools to automatically generate and suggest ideas for content. For games that are post-production, we are developing techniques to evaluate the success of content as well as technology to dynamically adjust content in response to players themselves.
- Springboard: Computer-Supported Level Design for Platformers
- Scenario Generation for Emergency Rescue Training Games
- QuestBrowser
- Xaat Disi: Player Adaptive Level Generation
Formal Approaches
The formal approaches group builds and tests the underlying logic, knowledge representations, and algorithms used to power expressive intelligence systems. Tackling problems in the expressive domain requires incorporating concerns from art and design as first class issues. We focus on finding the structure of design spaces for artifacts and processes which are traditionally only described informally, in terms of human experience, and find ways to exploit this structure in mixed-initiative systems that explore these spaces.
- Minstrel Remixed: A Rational Reconstruction of MINSTREL as a Problem Solver
- Building an Intelligent Game Designer
- Game-Mechanics Reasoning for Automated Design Support
- Expert Knowledge for Real-Time Strategy Games
- A Cartoon Making Experience
Characters and Narrative
The characters and narrative group focuses on developing the technology to model, generate, and author high quality, deeply interactive, and meaningful stories in games, and populate these dynamic game worlds with intelligent and believable characters backed by rich emotional and social models. Specifically, we aim to allow game designers, writers, and others without a technical backgrounds to harness this technology and create compelling story worlds that move beyond the combat and physical interaction focus of traditional games and ultimately explore a wider range of human social experiences.
Installations
Not all of projects fit into the academic research model, some of them simply need to be experienced in person. These installations invite us to reflect on ourselves though interaction with computational systems.
Game and Education
The games and education group conducts research on the role of games in the classroom. The goal may be to teach students how to be better game designers, or to use games to teach new concepts. In both cases there are difficult questions about what approaches produce the best outcomes for the students, and how to assess those outcomes.