Elegance in Game Design
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE AND AI IN GAMES, VOL. ?, NO. ?, ? 2012 1 Elegance in Game Design Cameron Browne, Member, IEEE Abstract—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 categorising 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 examined, and methods for estimating these values empirically 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. Index Terms—Game design, Computational aesthetics, Elegance, Shibui, Combinatorial game, Game complexity. F 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Domain PCG methods are increasingly being explored for the AMES have been a favourite testbed for Artificial generation of video game content [2], [4], and even entire G Intelligence (AI) researchers since the inception of games themselves [5], [6], [7]. These studies focus on the field. This has led from the initial formalisation of systems that can adapt or change rules as necessary, in methods for planning plausible moves, to the develop- order to maximise the player’s enjoyment and increase ment of competitive artificial players as search methods replay value. However, this paper focusses on the de- improve and domains are studied with greater vigour, sign of physical board games, specifically combinatorial to today’s computer players capable of beating human games [8], which are adversarial games that are: professionals and even solving a range of difficult board • zero-sum (concrete win/loss or draw results), games [1].
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