Designing for Improvisational Play: Social Simulation and Generative AI

Catalog description

The technology of games has evolved to very effectively simulate physics, and photorealistic representations – however, simulations of people and their interactions remain underexplored, particularly in mainstream practice. Seminal game designer Chris Crawford infamously dubbed these as ‘people games’. The pursuit of games which address this requires not only technological understanding of the problem space, but also a critical and humanistic one. This is a mixed game development and critical play focused course, looking mainly at games which feature simulated autonomous characters (or “agents”). Students will examine existing games spanning the last thirty years, and, use this to inform their own practical projects. This will further students’ practice with game development tools such as Unity and C#, and begin to introduce AI techniques.