TY - JOUR AU - Kreminski, Max AU - Dickinson, Melanie AU - Osborn, Joseph AU - Summerville, Adam AU - Mateas, Michael AU - Wardrip-Fruin, Noah PY - 2020/10/01 Y2 - 2024/03/18 TI - Germinate: A Mixed-Initiative Casual Creator for Rhetorical Games JF - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment JA - AIIDE VL - 16 IS - 1 SE - Full Oral Papers DO - 10.1609/aiide.v16i1.7417 UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/7417 SP - 102-108 AB - <p class="abstract">Digital games are hindered as an artform by significant technical barriers to entry, which exclude many would-be game developers from participating in this medium of expression. <em>Casual creators</em> for game design attempt to mitigate these barriers, but—like conventional game development tools—often require users to “work their way up” from low-level mechanics to high-level rhetorical or expressive goals, rather than allowing them to start with high-level rhetorical goals and “work their way down.” The constraint-based game generator Gemini is well-suited to the generation of games that meet high-level expressive goals, but is difficult for casual users to work with. We present Germinate, a mixed-initiative casual creator for rhetorical games that extends Gemini with a more approachable graphical user interface. A preliminary expert evaluation revealed that Germinate affords a playful approach to rhetorical game design by generating games that successfully meet user intent in surprising and novel ways.</p> ER -