Elegance in Game Design

This paper explores notions of elegance and shibui in combinatorial game design, and describes simple computational models for their estimation. Elegance is related to a game's simplicity, clarity, and efficiency, while shibui is a more complex concept from Japanese aesthetics that also incorporates depth. These provide new metrics for quantifying and categorizing games that are largely independent of existing measurements such as tractability and quality. Relevant ideas from Western and Eastern aesthetics are introduced, the meaning of elegance and shibui in combinatorial games is examined, and methods for estimating these values empirically are derived from complexity analyses. Elegance and shibui scores are calculated for a number of example games, for comparison. Preliminary results indicate shibui estimates to be more reliable than elegance estimates.

[1]  C. Lewis,et al.  An Experiment in Criticism , 1961 .

[2]  Mark H. M. Winands,et al.  Monte-Carlo Tree Search Solver , 2008, Computers and Games.

[3]  Frédéric Maire,et al.  Evolutionary Game Design , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[4]  E. Berlekamp,et al.  Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays , 1983 .

[5]  Maarten P. D. Schadd.  Selective search in games of different complexity , 2011 .

[6]  John Maeda,et al.  The laws of simplicity , 2006, Design, technology, business, life.

[7]  Cameron Browne,et al.  Connection Games - Variations on a Theme , 2005 .

[8]  Edward De Bono.  The 5-Day Course in Thinking , 1967 .

[9]  Csaba Szepesvári,et al.  Bandit Based Monte-Carlo Planning , 2006, ECML.

[10]  H. J. van den Herik,et al.  Which games will survive , 1990 .

[11]  Matthew E. May.  In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing , 2009 .

[12]  Olivier Teytaud,et al.  Revisiting Monte-Carlo Tree Search on a Normal Form Game: NoGo , 2011, EvoApplications.

[13]  Hélène Touzet,et al.  Analysis of Tree Edit Distance Algorithms , 2003, CPM.

[14]  Yoram Reich,et al.  A model of aesthetic judgment in design , 1993, Artif. Intell. Eng..

[15]  Daniel A. Ashlock,et al.  Automatic generation of game elements via evolution , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[16]  Morgan Lewis,et al.  Keeping it simple. , 2010, Medical economics.

[17]  Brian W. Kernighan,et al.  The Practice of Programming , 1999 .

[18]  William Bart,et al.  Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games , 2012, Int. J. Gaming Comput. Mediat. Simulations.

[19]  Mark E. Blomme.  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values , 2009 .

[20]  Joe Marks,et al.  Automatic Design of Balanced Board Games , 2007, AIIDE.

[21]  服部 嘉雄.  能動回路網のorder of complexity(速報) , 1965 .

[22]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Towards Automated Game Design , 2007, AI*IA.

[23]  Julian Togelius,et al.  Search-Based Procedural Content Generation: A Taxonomy and Survey , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

[24]  Ingo Althöfer,et al.  Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Recombination Games , 2010, J. Int. Comput. Games Assoc..

[25]  F de Miranda.  THE THREE MENTALITIES OF SUCCESSFUL BRIDGE DESIGN. BRIDGE AESTHETICS AROUND THE WORLD , 1991 .

[26]  Michael Mateas,et al.  Variations Forever: Flexibly generating rulesets from a sculptable design space of mini-games , 2010, Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games.

[27]  Julian Togelius,et al.  An experiment in automatic game design , 2008, 2008 IEEE Symposium On Computational Intelligence and Games.

[28]  Claude E. Shannon,et al.  Programming a computer for playing chess , 1950 .

[29]  L. V. Allis,et al.  Searching for solutions in games and artificial intelligence , 1994 .

[30]  Hiroyuki Iida,et al.  An Application of Game-Refinement Theory to Mah Jong , 2004, ICEC.

[31]  Hans Op de Beeck.  F. Gobet, A. de Voogt, J. Retschitzki, Moves in Mind: The Psychology of Board Games , 2005 .