Evaluating content generators

Abstract

Evaluating your content generator is a very important task, but difficult to do well. Creating a game content generator in general is much easier than creating a good game content generator—but what is a “good” content generator? That de- pends very much on what you are trying to create and why. This chapter discusses the importance and the challenges of evaluating content generators, and more gen- erally understanding a generator’s strengths and weaknesses and suitability for your goals. In particular, we discuss two different approaches to evaluating content gen- erators: visualizing the expressive range of generators, and using questionnaires to understand the impact of your generator on the player. These methods could broadly be called top-down and bottom-up methods for evaluating generators.