The Challenge of Automatic Level Generation for Platform Videogames Based on Stories and Quests
Jan 2013
In this article we bring the concepts of narrativism and ludology to automatic level generation for platform videogames. The initial motivation is to understand how this genre has been used as a storytelling medium. Based on a narrative theory of games, the differences among several titles have been identi- fied. In addition, we propose a set of abstraction layers to describe the content of a quest-based story in the particular context of videogames. Regarding auto- matic level generation for platform videogames, we observed that the existing approaches are directed to lower abstraction concepts such as avatar movements without a particular context or meaning. This leads us to the challenge of auto- matically creating more contextualized levels rather than only a set of consistent and playable entertaining tasks. With that in mind, a set of higher level design patterns are presented and their potential usages are envisioned and discussed.
