Darwin's Avatars
Dan Lessin, Sebastian Risi · 2015
The co-evolution of morphology and control for virtual creatures enables the creation of a novel form of gameplay and procedural content generation. Starting with a creature evolved to perform a simple task such as locomotion and removing its brain, the remaining body can be employed in a compelling interactive control problem. Just as we enjoy the challenge and reward of mastering helicopter flight or learning to play a musical instrument, learning to control such a creature through manual activation of its actuators presents an engaging and rewarding puzzle. Importantly, the novelty of this challenge is inexhaustible, since the evolution of virtual creatures provides a way to procedurally generate content for such a game. An endless series of creatures can be evolved for a task, then have their brains removed to become the game's next human-control challenge. To demonstrate this new form of gameplay and content generation, a proof-of-concept game--tentatively titled Darwin's Avatars--was implemented using evolved creature content, and user tested. This implementation also provided a unique opportunity to compare human and evolved control of evolved virtual creatures, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with interesting implications for improvements and future work.