Game-O-Matic: Generating Videogames that Represent Ideas

In this paper, we describe Game-O-Matic, a videogame authoring tool and generator that creates games that represent ideas. Through using a simple concept map input system, networks of nouns connected by verbs, Game-O-Matic is able to assemble simple arcade style game mechanics into videogames that represent the ideas represented in the concept map. Inspired by a view that videogames convey messages through their mechanics, Game-O-Matic makes use of the rhetorical affordances of explicitly defined abstract gameplay patterns, which we call micro-rhetorics. This paper explains how Game-O-Matic uses the concept map input to select appropriate abstract patterns of gameplay and then how these mash ups of patterns are shaped into coherent playable games that can be said to represent the user's intent.