First they’ll take our jobs. Then they’ll take our Mario.
While Nintendo works hard to let us build our own Mario levels, the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing an “artificially intelligent system” that can build its own stages.
The terror comes not in the fact it can build levels—procedural generation is everywhere these days—but in how it builds them.
The system has been programmed to build by watching. It’ll watch gameplay videos and live streaming videos, look at what’s been designed and then build it’s own creations.
It starts with a copy of an existing stage, then looks to see where players spend most of their time in a level, learns the design rules that went into that stage and applies those rules to original creations.
Below are two examples of a stage built by the system after studying human playthrough:
And below is the “system” after it’s done with Super Mario 3D World.
DISCUSSION
Ok... but can it give intent behind it’s design choices? And, you don’t need a computer system to have a computer generate levels... there’s this thing called procedural generation, except, that... the designer/programmer gives it the rules.