A case study in AI-assisted board game design

A case study in AI-assisted board game design

A case study in AI-assisted board game design

James Goodman, Alan Wallat, Diego Perez-Liebana, Simon Lucas

Abstract

"We use AI agents to play successive design iterations of an analogue board game to understand the sorts of questions a designer asks of a game, and how AI play-testing approaches can help answer these questions and reduce the need for time- consuming human play-testing. Our case study supports the view that AI play-testing can complement human testing, but can certainly not replace it. A core issue to be addressed is the extent to which the designer trusts the results of AI play-testing as sufficiently human-like. The majority of design changes are inspired from human play-testing, but AI play-testing helpfully complements these and often gave the designer the confidence to make changes faster where AI and humans ‘agreed’."

Reference

Goodman, J., Wallat, A., Perez-Liebana, D., & Lucas, S. (2023). A case study in AI-assisted board game design. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Games, AI, and Cognitive Science. http://www.diego-perez.net/papers/CaseStudyTAG-CoG23.pdf

Keywords

AI play-testing, Game design iteration, Human play-testing