Towards Generative Emotions In Games Based On Cognitive Modeling

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) accomplishes feats that once would be considered magic, creating near-infinite amounts of unique levels, worlds, objects and other content for games. Yet, despite this near magical quality, generated content is often found to have a sameness to it. After a short time it loses the interest of players. Many procedurally generated games, such as No Man's Sky, have disappointed customers in this sense. We argue that one important cause is generated content fails to create an emotional connection with players. Emotions help in keeping players engaged with game content [7] and thereby improve the gameplay experience. Among the many emotions players experience in games, surprise is perhaps the most important for PCG. Surprise intensifies other emotions [9] and it lies at the origin of humor, strategy and problem solving [15]. Thus, surprise helps to increase player enjoyment and engagement with games. So far, PCG in games has produced surprise by accident of chance. PCG systems which intentionally create surprising moments, in a controllable way, can play an important role in increasing engagement and interest in games.