Matthew Guzdial

@matthewguz.bsky.social

943 Followers 350 Following

Associate professor @ University of Alberta and Canada CIFAR AI Chair @ Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Games, machine learning, and creativity | he/him

Two posts in a row. The second is the above post. The first says “star fox is samsara and unless fox mccloud lets go of his world attachments (his place in the melee tier list) he will never attain the nature of Buddha and leave the cycle (getting a third game)”
Screenshot of a roll20 project saying F23 CMPUT 250 Anomaly and Launch Game
My cat Vincent Van Guzdial next to a stuffed Ikea shark
it is a mystery
Mike Cook talk slide with the text from Night in the Woods “At the end of everything, hold on to anything”
Mike Cook giving a talk with a screenshot from Night in the Woods with a character saying “stab stab staaab” and the text “But what happens if we disagree?”
A graph showing that a rules-based approach consistently underperformed at achieving desired anxiety levels measured in normalized SCL compared to an RL approach.
burger emoji in a car
Sign reading "Galactic World Generator" and "Matthew Guzdial, PhD, Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta", and "2025 Science Fellow"
I have a skull and say I'm going to "commune" with it and then instantly turn into a skeleton
Brainstorming white board with a bunch of text on it, including Generating Parody/Humor, Generating TTRPG Mechanics, Testing Games, Playtraces/Design traces as Resources, Serious/Education Games, Human-Pet Interaction in Games, Tension Curves as a universal temporal design language, Learning learning styles, and Prosocial gameplay detection.
A plot of Tokens vs Soldiers, there's a very large black dot at the top right (5 soldiers, 15 tokens) with much smaller dots at every other point in the plot.
Matthew Guzdial selfie with his lab students
Morai Maker interface, based on mechanic Maker but with a big "End turn" button.
Screenshots of tasks discovered by Dr. Bezemer through analyses of game development blogs.
Table on the "Proposed purposes of a quest" from "The Definition-Context-Purpose Paradigm and Other Insights from Industry Professionals about the Definition of a Quest"
Screenshot of a staircase from A sparse grid representation for dynamic three-dimensional worlds
(eventSequence ?eventA ?eventB) [?eventA "eventType" "betray"] [?eventA "actor" ?char] [?eventB "eventType" "betray"] [?eventB "actor" ?char] [?char "trait" "impulsive"] (not-join [?char ?eventA ?eventB] (eventSequence ?eventA ?eventMid ?eventB) [?eventMid "actor" ?char])
Screenshot from the paper "A Design Framework for Reflective Play"
Box with EDI printed on it
1800’s to 1930’s Mathematical basis for many AI approaches developed 1943 Perceptron proposed (basic building block of modern neural networks) 1956 Dartmouth Workshop (“AI” is named) 1957 Application of Markov Chains (small Language Model) to generate music 1970’s to early 1980’s First “AI Winter”, funding dries up 1988 “Expert Systems” used to generate computer chips 1990’s to 2000’s Second “AI Winter”, funding dries up 1998 Beginning of the “Big Data” era 2012 AlexNet wins ImageNet competition 2017 Transformer proposed 2020 Diffusion proposed 2023 “Generative AI”
Photo of a white board with the words "Truth" in large letters in the middle. It is surrounded by various words like "Framework", "Descriptive", and "Prescriptive", "Machine Learning", and so on.
Screencap from the Nature paper showing several examples of altering a frame and looking at the changes over time.
Photo by Richard Zhao of me zooming into the AIIDE 2024 end of conference announcements
Cook, Michael, Simon Colton, and Jeremy Gow. "The angelina videogame design system—part i." IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 9.2 (2016): 192-203. Treanor, Mike, et al. "AI-based game design patterns." Foundations of Digital Games (2015). Cook, Michael. "Puck: a slow and personal automated game designer." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. Vol. 18. No. 1. 2022. Liapis, Antonios, et al. "Orchestrating game generation." IEEE Transactions on Games 11.1 (2018): 48-68. Gaudl, Swen E., et al. "Exploring novel game spaces with fluidic games." arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.01403 (2018). Anjum, Asad, et al. "The Ink Splotch Effect: A case study on ChatGPT as a co-creative game designer." Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 2024. Hu, Chengpeng, Yunlong Zhao, and Jialin Liu. "Game generation via large language models." 2024 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE, 2024. Gallotta, Roberto, et al. "Large language models and games: A survey and roadmap." arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.18659 (2024). Zhou, Hongwei, et al. "The Eyes, the Hands and the Brain: What can Text-to-Image Models Offer for Game Design and Visual Creativity?." Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 2024. Bruce, Jake, et al. "Genie: Generative interactive environments." Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning. 2024. Valevski, Dani, et al. "Diffusion models are real-time game engines." arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.14837 (2024). Agarwal, Neal "Infinite Craft." Neal.Fun (2024). https://neal.fun/infinite-craft/ Sun, Yuqian, et al. "Language as reality: a co-creative storytelling game experience in 1001 nights using generative AI." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. Vol. 19. No. 1. 2023. and two more...
Oz Project: Early History of Emotion Modelling Oz Project [1980-90s]: modelling emotion for interactive drama https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/oz/web/oz.html Lyotard the Cat: Text adventure with a cat that’s distrusting at first but becomes grateful once fed https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/project/oz/web/lyotard2.html The Woggles (right): Planning agents with emotion models interact in an environment. Actions had (authored) emotional effects on other agents.