UC Santa Cruz

Video Games are a media platform that cannot be ignored - yet when we ask what methods can we use to make a successful video game, the answers are blurry. Players seem to care about the emergent properties of games that science traditionally struggles with: fun, balance, feel, and so on. These terms tend to be stigmatized in a research community - yet they also seem to be some of the strongest indicators of a game’s success. This thesis presents two papers that offer a framework to understand how we might start getting good design recommendations for emergent properties through a deep analysis of the conscious experience of players. In the first, we present an automated game design system (AGD) that aims to generate “balanced” games. In the second, we provide a theoretical discussion on why we might need to take unconventional routes of analysis to produce impactful games. Together, these papers present a picture not only of how to think about design strategies of emergent properties in games, but also a case-study of developing such a system and deploying it amongst users.