Automated Game Design (AGD) empowers game designers with languages and tools that automate game design processes. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) promise to deliver an expressive means for rapidly prototyping and fine-tuning interaction mechanisms that support rich emergent player experiences. However, despite the growing number of studies that center around languages for games and play, few prototypes are ever thoroughly validated and evaluated in practice. As a result, it is not yet well understood what the costs, benefits and limitations of DSLs for games are. To find out, we conduct research into Programming Languages (PL) and digital games. In particular, we study to what extent rules, affordances and play can be related to a game’s source code. In recently published work, we have studied PuzzleScript, a language and online game engine with an active user community. To enable its empirical study, we have leveraged the Rascal meta-programming language in creating ScriptButler, a novel tool prototype and engine for PuzzleScript analysis. To validate our approach, we have conducted an empirical study on the quality of the source code by performing an analysis on a curated collection of 95 games. Our results show that ScriptButler can identify bugs and helps relate PuzzleScript rules to game qualities. In this talk, we place our work in a broader context, and discuss challenges and opportunities for future research on PL and digital games.

Riemer van Rozen is a lecturer and researcher at the Software Analysis and Transformation group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Since 2011, he has collaborated with industry in several applied research projects on languages and tools that speed up development and improve software quality. His research focuses on generic solutions for domain-specific languages and live programming environments in general, and automated game design in particular. PhD Dissertation: R.A. van Rozen. “Languages of Games and Play: Automating Game Design & Enabling Live Programming”, University of Amsterdam, Feb 2020. link.