Aesthetic Bot: Interactively Evolving Game Maps on Twitter
This addresses the problem of interactive and automated aesthetic evaluation for game map design, though it is incremental in combining existing social media and evolutionary methods.
The paper introduces Aesthetic Bot, a Twitter account that posts game maps and uses polls to collect user votes on aesthetic preferences, then learns from these votes to generate more appealing maps.
This paper describes the implementation of the Aesthetic Bot, an automated Twitter account that posts images of small game maps that are either user-made or generated from an evolutionary system. The bot then prompts users to vote via a poll posted in the image's thread for the most aesthetically pleasing map. This creates a rating system that allows for direct interaction with the bot in a way that is integrated seamlessly into a user's regularly updated Twitter content feed. Upon conclusion of the each voting round, the bot learns from the distribution of votes for each map to emulate user preferences for design and visual aesthetic in order to generate maps that would win future vote pairings. We discuss the ongoing results and emerging behaviors that have occurred since the release of this system from both the bot's generation of game maps and the participating Twitter users.