Measuring Games

Abstract

One of the key tasks of a general game system such as Ludi is to evaluate the quality of the content that it produces. To this end, Ludi’s Criticism module returns an estimated aesthetic score for each candidate games indicating how likely it will be of interest to human players. This estimated score is based on underlying principles of game design and a new aesthetic model that incorporates intrinsic properties of the rule set and extrinsic properties that emerge during play. A number of aesthetic criteria are automatically measured through self-play and combined to give a final score. This chapter describes the aesthetic criteria implemented for Ludi and the evaluation process, and concludes with an experiment conducted to determine whether the predicted aesthetic scores correlate with human player rankings for a given set of games.

The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.

Siegbert Tarrasch