Learning from play: Facilitating character design through genetic programming and human mimicry

Abstract

Mimicry and play are fundamental learning processes by which individuals can acquire behaviours, skills and norms. In this paper we utilise these two processes to create new game characters by mimicking and learning from actual human players. We present our approach towards aiding the design process of game characters through the use of genetic programming. The current state of the art in game character design relies heavily on human designers to manually create and edit scripts and rules for game characters. Computational creativity approaches this issue with fully autonomous character generators, replacing most of the design process using black box solutions such as neural networks. Our GP approach to this problem not only mimics actual human play but creates character controllers which can be further authored and developed by a designer. This keeps the designer in the loop while reducing repetitive labour. Our system also provides insights into how players express themselves in games and into deriving appropriate models for representing those insights. We present our framework and preliminary results supporting our claim.