The Ink Splotch Effect: A Case Study on ChatGPT as a Co-Creative Game Designer
This study addresses the potential for AI to enhance or alter creative processes in game design, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM capabilities without introducing new methods.
The paper investigates whether ChatGPT can serve as a creative collaborator in game design by comparing human-designed and AI-assisted game prototypes across three genres, finding that participants showed no clear preference for AI-generated games over human ones in a blind evaluation.
This paper studies how large language models (LLMs) can act as effective, high-level creative collaborators and ``muses'' for game design. We model the design of this study after the exercises artists use by looking at amorphous ink splotches for creative inspiration. Our goal is to determine whether AI-assistance can improve, hinder, or provide an alternative quality to games when compared to the creative intents implemented by human designers. The capabilities of LLMs as game designers are stress tested by placing it at the forefront of the decision making process. Three prototype games are designed across 3 different genres: (1) a minimalist base game, (2) a game with features and game feel elements added by a human game designer, and (3) a game with features and feel elements directly implemented from prompted outputs of the LLM, ChatGPT. A user study was conducted and participants were asked to blindly evaluate the quality and their preference of these games. We discuss both the development process of communicating creative intent to an AI chatbot and the synthesized open feedback of the participants. We use this data to determine both the benefits and shortcomings of AI in a more design-centric role.