Hello Game World

Feature written for February 2012 issue of Develop magazine.

I spoke to Mike Cook, from the Computational Creativity group at Imperial College London, about a future he’s bringing about in which games are designed by machines.

Angelina is a remarkable games designer. At only a year old, she’s designed several arcade-style games, a handful of platformers, and is to ready to tackle point-and-click adventures. She’s also not human. Half way through a chat over coffee in a university cafeteria, Mike Cook – gamer, computer scientist, and Angelina’s creator – stops himself. “I have to avoid calling it ‘she’ and ‘her’”, he laughs. “Slightly unhealthy, but there you go.”

Angelina is an AI system developed as an experiment in automated game design, part of a vision in which AI is not simply a source of increasingly sophisticated NPC behaviour, but has a hand in designing games themselves. “Almost everywhere has a bit of procedural content generation whether it’s narratives, music, whatever”, says Cook, “and all of that is backed up with what we would call AI.” Cook is part of Imperial College London’s Computational Creativity research group, which, as he puts it, “investigates processes we call creative when we see humans do them and tries to simulate them in AI”.

Download the (free) digital edition of Develop 124 (February 2012) to read the full interview (page 44).

Update [13.02.12] You can now read this online.