From Mechanics to Meaning
Adam Summerville, Chris Martens, Sarah Harmon, Michael Mateas, Joseph Osborn, Noah Wardrip–Fruin, Arnav H. Jhala · IEEE Transactions on Games · 2017
While generative approaches to game design offer great promise, systems can only reliably generate what they can “understand,” which is often represented in a limited, implicit form in hand-crafted evaluation functions or constructive rules. Proceduralist readings, a semiformal approach for interpreting the meaning of a game based on its underlying processes and interactions in conjunction with aesthetic and cultural cues, offer a novel, systematic approach to game understanding. We formalize proceduralist argumentation as a logic program that performs static reasoning over game specifications to derive higher level meanings, as part of Gemini, a bidirectional game analysis and generation system.