Rafael Fajardo
Director, SWEAT collaborative
Associate Professor,
Emergent Digital Practices
University of Denver

 

Projects: Generative Game Engine

This is a work in development, currently in an early “alpha” stage, by the SWEAT collaborative, with Chad Schmidt and I being the project group. Because we are evolving the roles of our collaboration, job titles are insufficient.

The Generative Game Engine is a provocative evolution from the Generic Game Engine. It accepts as input any (any!) ASCII text file and converts it into a map for a game. It will define – from within the text – areas that are navigable and areas that are not. It will also define a “boss” or antagonist and powerups from specific characters within the text. We are still coming to understand the artistic and critical implications of this. It is currently actualized in Konfabulator, an infrastructure for creating and publishing compact software widgets. We aspire to actualize it in a form that can exist in a modern web browser.

The Generative Game Engine is theory and it is criticism. It is infrastructure that enables the creation of other work. It recontextualizes and recodes texts.

Generative Game Engine is a product of SWEAT
Project Director: Rafael Fajardo
Software Design: Chad Schmidt

Publications
A photo-essay co-authored with Chad Schmidt, was submitted for publication to the IDMAA journal. It is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2005.

Process Galleries
Interface bits
Source code