This notion of quality currently comes from Cook’s own ideas about game design (such as ensuring that the game is not impossible to win or lose, and offering players a number of interesting choices at each step), but in time, he says, the system will learn from the feedback of players, as well as the AI’s experience of playing games made by human designers. “Angelina doesn’t set out to make a game in a particular genre-instead, it tries to build games that match its notion of what a good game is,” says Cook. But in the software’s current iteration, which has been designed for further expansion, its repertoire has expanded to other genres, such as puzzle games and adventures. In its early years, Angelina was limited to developing platform games, in the style of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. This information is written to a text file that can then be run by a stand-alone application, in the same way that a game cartridge is read by a game console. It can make games from images that it pulls from license-free depositories such as Wikimedia Commons, and it can flesh out the premise and rules with characters and ideas lifted from online newspapers or social media (think U.S. The AI then describes a new game in a unique description language that outlines both the game’s rules and its levels.
On the surface, Angelina works with striking simplicity: Cook presses a button labeled “Play,” and it boots up. The goal for Angelina is that it will dream up completely new elements of games-a form of computational creativity. Moreover, it could help AI designers lower the cost of making games.
Although in some domains-such as law, ethics, and health care-ignorance of tradition and precedent is a clear weakness for an AI, in game design it is a strength that could unlock new creativity. The next frontier is using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques to design entirely new kinds of games that have, to date, evaded the human imagination. Game-making algorithms are almost as old as video games, but their use has typically been limited to generating terrain and other simple digital art. Since its earliest form, in 2011, it has created hundreds of experimental video games, received acclaim in an international game-making competition, and had its work featured in a New York gallery exhibit. Cook calls the machine Angelina, a recursive acronym that stands for “A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I’ve Named Angelina” (a joke that Cook says got old pretty quickly). Michael Cook, a 30-year-old senior research fellow at the University of Falmouth, has built an AI capable of imagining new video games from scratch.