Beyond game design: player actions evolve new game spaces –

Charbitat is an experimental game project conducted at the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The work is conducted in the Experimental Game Lab (EGL) with practical support fom GVU and financial support from Turner Broadcasting.

We look at the active connection between a game character and the surrounding game space. So far, the game spaces provided few adjustments in dependency to the way a player played a certain character.

Our aim is to map the character behavior onto a procedurally created video game world. Although consequences of the players’ actions have been implemented in the character design of games to occasionally impressive detail, they have not been mapped onto the navigable world itself. In August 2005 we started Charbitat to explore this idea through a practical game prototype. At its core is the idea of procedural space – game arenas that are not fixed but created by the game during runtime.

Oh yeah, now we’re getting somewhere — color me Serotonin Pink, as in tickled — !

Via We Make Money, Not Art

Procedural environment use basic algorithms and varying seed values to generate the virtual space. In Charbitat, the space moves and is re-created over time depending on how players interact with it, their actions are translated into a data set which influences the seed values that controls the manipulation of the game world. Result: Charbitat allows players to craft personalized and meaningful environment simply by playing.

The system plugs into an existing commercial game engine (Unreal), splits up the world in tiles, clarify seed values (five elements: earth, water, wood, fire and metal). All along the game, the player is informed on the status, he or she can trace their actions.

The stories, developed as you’re playing, are always unique but they can be shared.