Togelius: Automatic Game Design

An interpretation of Raph Koster's "Theory of Fun for Fame Design", or of Juergen Schmidhuber's curiosity principle wrote:
"A good game is one that is not winnable by a novice player, but which the player can learn to play better and better over time, and eventually win; it has a smooth learning curve."

Not sure I agree with this, certainly not for what I call a good game, though perhaps that definition is so obscure, capricious and mercurial that it would elude anyone."

I think the definition above is more of "a game that is not too easy, nor frustratingly hard" - focused only on the difficultly, not whether it is actually any fun. Of course measuring this is a bit more tricky, involving the usual method of employing playtesters. This is why I think making a fun game, as the title mentions is beyond anything automated, however recursive it may be - feedback is needed from a human at some point. After all, it takes legions of designers and developers to come up with some right stinkers - what chance does a machine have of lucking out with an awesome game?

BlogBuilder, University of Warwick

Looks like someone else has discovered "blogging". Namely the place where I work. Seems I've made it six months without posting to my existing blog and don't particularly feel any ill effects.
Who'd have thought it?

Still don't know what to use this for apart from babbling on about different fonts. I thought I should read some other peoples blogs but they just seemed to be like diaries of what they were doing/feeling and talking about other people and stuff I'd have to read the entire thing to find out - I'm not really that interested in them, not knowing them, and I'm sure some of their friends aren't even that interested. Sort of a diary, but made public so that anyone can read it - maybe I should check out some people's very early entries to see if they couldn't decide what to use it for either, I can't be unique in that regard. While (thanks to the Google toolbar) I had a blog before I knew what to do with it, not everyone can have decided "I need a blog to do this" and then gone out and got one.

The menu on the left says:

For more information, see these topics in our Knowledge Base:
How do I post to my blog?
What is the difference between Post and Publish?
How do I make a link to another webpage?
How can I make words bold or in italics?
How do I edit what I've written?
How do I delete a post?
How do I find an old post?

No help there, then.

Well I changed the horrible Lucida Grande,MS Sans Serif,Lucida Sans Unicode or whatever it was font to be Verdana, and set it to 70%, so now when I italicise something, it doesn't run into the next word, and the size is more to my liking. Viewers can always change it with their browser settings, I just like it fairly small, not cartoonishly large as it was. I could go back and change the bolds back to italics now, but then neither of these last two postings would make any sense.

I still haven't really decided what I want to use this blog for, day-to-day work stuff I don't really want to talk about - and could lead to unemployment if I were indiscreet. Family "history" stuff like the Dec05 1:44 entry is easy enough to talk about, but only when it pops unbidden into my head and is vaguely relevant - I'm not about to sit down and tell my life story (to what is, in all honesty, only myself). That'd be like writing my memoirs or something - whatever the hell they are - something either Barbar the Elephant's Dad or Moomin Papa was always doing, I forget which.

I know what it's "supposed" to be used for, being a web log it should be a log of stuff I do/find/think is cool on the web but quite apart from the fact anyone be they an employer (potential or existing) or a data-mining outfit could use it to track my web usage, I don't really need a catalogue of web sites I've visited - that's what bookmarks are for. In actuality I've pretty much abandoned bookmarks too (infact have done since before they were more commonly known as favorites [sic]) as I just ended up with a big list of dead links. I've scarcely found anywhere that's impossible to relocate without TSOGL(1) or a quick glance through my Sent Items in my mailbox. My favourites are now consigned to the links toolbar in IE, totaling around 13 - and them only for convenience.

Work was fairly unusual this week, as our director resigned today, but I would be really stupid to say any more on that subject. Just a note-to-self, really so I remember when it was it happened.

[1] Thirty Seconds On GoogLe

The italics supposing to mean emphasis seem to look like complete crap with this template I've chosen and just run into the next word, so I've replaced emphasization with bold it still looks a bit crap and stands out too much, but I hope it's still readable in the way I intend. If it later annoys me I'll *just use stars* or something ;)

My Blog. Maybe it's like a diary or something? When I was a kid my mum "made" me and my kid sister keep diaries, like it was healthy or would make us better at English or something. Consequently it became a chore and I hated it, I wonder where they are now? Mum probably has them stashed somewhere, should ask her sometime - I suspect she used them to find out secrets we might be keeping from her, but she missed the plot big time there. I mean we were like 8 and 6/7 maybe and the mere thought of actually deceiving Mum seemed ludicrous - she just knew. Like we were autistic or something. Just one "what have you got to tell me then?" and my guts would just spill - I hadn't the logical capability to discern that she couldn't possibly know. Consequently there never needed to be any secrets in the diaries and when after about six months of daily entries saying "went to school, came home, watched Scooby Doo, went to bed" and a few "Mum shouted at Dad for taking our side" I guess we both abandoned the idea as mutually detrimental.

So, my blog as a diary? Don't think so. I could argue that the trauma of my first chronicular experience left me tainted and bruised, but honestly and forthrightly, I couldn't then and can't now be arsed.

Well I got the Google toolbar and there's this 'B' button and I click it and so now I have a blog. I've never read any blogs so I don't really get what the hell they are supposed to be about. I kind of think maybe they're just written by sad bastards to share stuff with their mates, but I'm pretty sure no-one will ever read this - that's why I called it "talking to myself". I was gonna just put stuff in it I find when I'm surfing so I can show other people it, saying "it's in my blog" and that will make me really cool. Or not.