Evolving Simple Art-Based Games

Evolutionary art has a long and distinguished history, and genetic programming is one of only a handful of AI techniques which is used in graphic design and the visual arts. A recent trend in so-called ‘new media’ art is to design online pieces which are dynamic and have an element of interaction and sometimes simple game-playing aspects. This defines the challenge addressed here: to automatically evolve dynamic, interactive art pieces with game elements. We do this by extending the Avera user-driven evolutionary art system to produce programs which generate spirograph-style images by repeatedly placing, scaling, rotating and colouring geometric objects such as squares and circles. Such images are produced in an inherently causal way which provides the dynamic element to the pieces. We further extend the system to produce programs which react to mouse clicks, and to evolve sequential patterns of clicks for the user to uncover. We wrap the programs in a simple front end which provides the user with feedback on how close they are to uncovering the pattern, adding a lightweight game-playing element to the pieces. The evolved interactive artworks are a preliminary step in the creation of more sophisticated multimedia pieces.