Publications (22)
Software Engineering For Automated Game Design
Michael Cook
As we develop more assistive and automated game design systems, the question of how these systems should be integrated into game development workflows, and how much adaptation may…
Return of the King: Time-Series Photometry of FO Aquarii's Initial Recovery from its Unprecedented 2016 Low State
Colin Littlefield, Peter Garnavich, Mark R. Kennedy +28
In 2016 May, the intermediate polar FO~Aqr was detected in a low state for the first time in its observational history. We report time-resolved photometry of the system during its…
Exploring Novel Game Spaces with Fluidic Games
Swen E. Gaudl, Mark J. Nelson, Simon Colton +5
With the growing integration of smartphones into our daily lives, and their increased ease of use, mobile games have become highly popular across all demographics. People listen to…
How To Save A World: The Go-Along Interview as Game Preservation Methodology in Wurm Online
Florence Smith Nicholls, Michael Cook
Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games boomed in the late 1990s to 2000s. In parallel, ethnographic studies of these communities emerged, generally involving participant observat…
AI-Generated Imagery: A New Era for the `Readymade'
Amy Smith, Michael Cook
While the term `art' defies any concrete definition, this paper aims to examine how digital images produced by generative AI systems, such as Midjourney, have come to be so regular…
Why Oatmeal is Cheap: Kolmogorov Complexity and Procedural Generation
Younès Rabii, Michael Cook
Although procedural generation is popular among game developers, academic research on the topic has primarily focused on new applications, with some research into empirical analysi…
Optimists at Heart: Why Do We Research Game AI? (Extended Version)
Michael Cook
In this paper we survey the motivations behind contemporary game AI research by analysing individual publications, the researchers themselves, and the institutions that influence t…
On the Evaluation of Procedural Level Generation Systems
Oliver Withington, Michael Cook, Laurissa Tokarchuk
The evaluation of procedural content generation (PCG) systems for generating video game levels is a complex and contested topic. Ideally, the field would have access to robust, gen…
'That Darned Sandstorm': A Study of Procedural Generation through Archaeological Storytelling
Florence Smith Nicholls, Michael Cook
Procedural content generation has been applied to many domains, especially level design, but the narrative affordances of generated game environments are comparatively understudied…
The Road Less Travelled: Trying And Failing To Generate Walking Simulators
Michael Cook
Automated game design is a rapidly growing area of research, yet many aspects of game design lie largely unexamined still, as most systems focus on two-dimensional games with clear…
Trash to Treasure: Using text-to-image models to inform the design of physical artefacts
Amy Smith, Hope Schroeder, Ziv Epstein +3
Text-to-image generative models have recently exploded in popularity and accessibility. Yet so far, use of these models in creative tasks that bridge the 2D digital world and the c…
The asynchronous polar V1432 Aquilae and its path back to synchronism
David Boyd, Joseph Patterson, William Allen +23
V1432 Aquilae is the only known eclipsing asynchronous polar. In this respect it is unique and therefore merits our attention. We report the results of a 15-year campaign by the gl…
The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring
Florence Smith Nicholls, Michael Cook
Archaeology can be broadly defined as the study and interpretation of the past through material remains. Videogame worlds, though immaterial in nature, can also afford opportunitie…
Off The Beaten Lane: AI Challenges In MOBAs Beyond Player Control
Michael Cook, Adam Summerville, Simon Colton
MOBAs represent a huge segment of online gaming and are growing as both an eSport and a casual genre. The natural starting point for AI researchers interested in MOBAs is to develo…
Periodic Variations in the Residual Eclipse Flux and Eclipse Timings of Asynchronous Polar V1432 Aql: Evidence of a Shifting Threading Region
Colin Littlefield, Koji Mukai, Ryan Cain +8
We report the results of a twenty-eight-month photometric campaign studying V1432 Aql, the only known eclipsing, asynchronous polar. Our data show that both the residual eclipse fl…
PCG-Based Game Design Patterns
Michael Cook, Mirjam Eladhari, Andy Nealen +5
People enjoy encounters with generative software, but rarely are they encouraged to interact with, understand or engage with it. In this paper we define the term 'PCG-based game',…
A Vision For Continuous Automated Game Design
Michael Cook
ANGELINA is an automated game design system which has previously been built as a single software block which designs games from start to finish. In this paper we outline a roadmap…
Generative Forensics: Procedural Generation and Information Games
Michael Cook
Procedural generation is used across game design to achieve a wide variety of ends, and has led to the creation of several game subgenres by injecting variance, surprise or unpredi…
Planetary Collisions outside the Solar System: Time Domain Characterization of Extreme Debris Disks
Huan Y. A. Meng, Kate Y. L. Su, George H. Rieke +9
Luminous debris disks of warm dust in the terrestrial planet zones around solar-like stars are recently found to vary, indicative of ongoing large-scale collisions of rocky objects…
Impressions of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft
Christoph Salge, Claus Aranha, Adrian Brightmoore +15
The GDMC AI settlement generation challenge is a PCG competition about producing an algorithm that can create an "interesting" Minecraft settlement for a given map. This paper cont…
The Social Responsibility of Game AI
Michael Cook
Over the last decade we have watched as artificial intelligence has been transformed into one of the most important issues of our time, and games have grown into the biggest entert…
Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Procedural Content Generators
Matthew Guzdial, Devi Acharya, Max Kreminski +4
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design ca…