Nell

Gillian Smith

Nell is a creative, AI artist whose medium is needlework, built on the hoopla embroidery sampler generator. Nell surfs twitter for inspiration for her embroidery designs, and is currently being “taught” how to have an embroidery machine realize her designs in a tangible form, as well as advertise the designs on twitter for others to download and create.

 

PCG History

Gillian Smith

The PCG history project investigates the role of procedural content generation in non-digital and early digital games, looking at themes in how it is used and incorporated into a game’s design, and how the role of PCG in games has evolved across time and media.

 

Everything I Know I Learned From The Internet

Mike Cook

This project aims to explore the idea of procedurally generating a game’s surface-level meaning, by dynamically querying the internet while the game is being played. While originally a positive project intending to define new generative techniques for games, it is now closer to a cautionary example of the dangers of such a system. Ultimately, I found that scraping meaning from open Internet data obtains more prejudice than it does fact. Everything I Know was pulled from a museum’s launch lineup due to being too potentially offensive to control, and I’m now exploring ways in which the game can demonstrate this power to the player without abusing it.

 

Procedural Generation – Plenty, For Everyone

Mike Cook

Procedural generation and other artificial intelligence techniques unlock a vast range of possibilities for designers and others working with games. But they’re locked behind huge barriers of technical understanding, and this means they’re only accessible to people with the right kind of education and background. Games are increasingly being used as a means of artistic and personal expression, but the availability of technology limits how people can express themselves. I’m intrested in finding ways we can make this complex technology more accessible to everyone – either by developing tools that make it easier to use, or producing teaching resources and programs that make it easier to learn.

Mind Shadows

Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari

In the game Mind Shadows players take difficult situations from real life and make them into Shadows. The situations are systematised in emotional terms, broken down to sets of actions that have different emotional effects. The goal for the players is to cunningly, together, use social actions to overcome the Shadows while supporting each other.

Mind Shadows is for two or three players, and is developed both as a board game and as a digital game for tablets. The design makes use of the agent architecture Mind Module, which gives characters personality, emotions, and moods.

The idea is to make a game where players can approach complex, difficult, or confusing situations from real life by systematising them. What is actually done? What effect does it have on you, and on your co-players? How can you understand it, respond to it, and is it possible to give the Shadow less significance? Early play tests have shown that this is done particularly well among friends, and that one can have lots of laughs along the way (no matter how grim the shadow).