{"title":"Reconstructing Existing Levels through Level Inpainting","authors":"Johor Jara Gonzalez, Matthew Guzdial","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27523","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27523","url":null,"abstract":"Procedural Content Generation (PCG) and Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) have been used in prior work for generating levels in various games. This paper introduces Content Augmentation and focuses on the subproblem of level inpainting, which involves reconstructing and extending video game levels. Drawing inspiration from image inpainting, we adapt two techniques from this domain to address our specific use case. We present two approaches for level inpainting: an Autoencoder and a U-net. Through a comprehensive case study, we demonstrate their superior performance compared to a baseline method and discuss their relative merits. Furthermore, we provide a practical demonstration of both approaches for the level inpainting task and offer insights into potential directions for future research.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distribution Fairness in Multiplayer AI Using Shapley Constraints","authors":"Robert C. Gray, Jichen Zhu, Santiago Ontañón","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27519","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27519","url":null,"abstract":"Experience management (EM) agents in multiplayer serious games face unique challenges and responsibilities regarding the fair treatment of players. One such challenge is the Greedy Bandit Problem that arises when using traditional Multi-Armed Bandits (MABs) as EM agents, which results in some players routinely prioritized while others may be ignored. We will show that this problem can be a cause of player non-adherence in a multiplayer serious game played by human users. To mitigate this effect, we propose a new bandit strategy, the Shapley Bandit, which enforces fairness constraints in its treatment of players based on the Shapley Value. We evaluate our approach via simulation with virtual players, finding that the Shapley Bandit can be effective in providing more uniform treatment of players while incurring only a slight cost in overall performance to a typical greedy approach. Our findings highlight the importance of fair treatment among players as a goal of multiplayer EM agents and discuss how addressing this issue may lead to more effective agent operation overall. The study contributes to the understanding of player modeling and EM in serious games and provides a promising approach for balancing fairness and engagement in multiplayer environments.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Persona Agents from Playtraces and Emotion","authors":"Pedro M. Fernandes, Manuel Lopes, Rui Prada","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27517","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27517","url":null,"abstract":"This paper proposes a novel pipeline for generating agents that simulate player behaviour. By clustering player traces and using evolutionary algorithms to evolve parametric agents to best represent those clusters, our pipeline creates persona agents that represent the behavioural space of players. We here propose clustering playtraces based on behaviour, emotional experience and a mixture of both. We implement the pipeline on a test bed game and using 182 collected player traces with both behavioural and emotional information, we demonstrate that our persona agents can generate diverse player-like behaviour both in the level used to evolve them but also in a previously unseen level. We further find that using emotional information leads to better behavioural coverage on both levels. Although on its early stages, our approach offers a new perspective on how game developers and testers can gather insights on player behaviour without having to rely on extensive user testing.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Timothy Merino, Roman Negri, Dipika Rajesh, M Charity, Julian Togelius
{"title":"The Five-Dollar Model: Generating Game Maps and Sprites from Sentence Embeddings","authors":"Timothy Merino, Roman Negri, Dipika Rajesh, M Charity, Julian Togelius","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27506","url":null,"abstract":"The five-dollar model is a lightweight text-to-image generative architecture that generates low dimensional images or tile maps from an encoded text prompt. This model can successfully generate accurate and aesthetically pleasing content in low dimensional domains, with limited amounts of training data. Despite the small size of both the model and datasets, the generated images or maps are still able to maintain the encoded semantic meaning of the textual prompt. We apply this model to three small datasets: pixel art video game maps, video game sprite images, and down-scaled emoji images and apply novel augmentation strategies to improve the performance of our model on these limited datasets. We evaluate our models' performance using cosine similarity score between text-image pairs generated by the CLIP VIT-B/32 model to demonstrate quality generation.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eugene You Chen Chen, Adam White, Nathan R. Sturtevant
{"title":"Entropy as a Measure of Puzzle Difficulty","authors":"Eugene You Chen Chen, Adam White, Nathan R. Sturtevant","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27499","url":null,"abstract":"Evaluating and ranking the difficulty and enjoyment of puzzles is important in game design. Typically, such rankings are constructed manually for each specific game, which can be time consuming, subject to designer bias, and requires extensive play testing. An approach to ranking that generalizes across multiple puzzle games is even more challenging because of their variation in factors like rules and goals. This paper introduces two general approaches to compute puzzle entropy, and uses them to evaluate puzzles that players enjoy. The resulting uncertainty score is equivalent to the number of bits of data necessary to communicate the solution of a puzzle to a player of a given skill level. We apply our new approaches to puzzles from the 2016 game, The Witness. The computed entropy scores largely reproduce the order of a set of puzzles that introduce a new mechanic in the game. The scores are also positively correlated with the user ratings of user-created Witness puzzles, providing evidence that our approach captures notions of puzzle difficulty and enjoyment. Our approach is designed to exploit game-specific knowledge in a general way and thus can extended to provide automatic rankings or curricula in a variety of applications.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"DendryScope: Narrative Designer Support via Symbolic Analysis","authors":"Jasmine Otto, Autumn Chen, Adam M. Smith","doi":"10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v19i1.27527","url":null,"abstract":"Quality-based narratives (QBN) are hypertexts with extensive implicit linked structure. The observation of one passage can have non-obvious long-range implications for the reachability of other passages, which poses an authoring challenge. To help narrative designers address this issue, we produced an interface which visually summarizes all possible playtraces. Our interface leverages answer set programming to produce a query language over possible playtraces, allowing narrative designers to drill down to interesting scenarios. We introduce this interface through the DendryScope tool, which accepts most QBNs written in the Dendry language. We evaluated DendryScope by interviewing four narrative designers as they used the tool to explore Bee, a notable QBN written by Emily Short.","PeriodicalId":498041,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135303350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}