Feminism and procedural content generation: toward a collaborative politics of computational creativity

ABSTRACT

Games now inhabit a space where creativity is no longer centered around human authorship. The use of procedural content generation has been embraced by industry, academics and fans as a means for reducing labor cost, providing additional replayable content for players, investigating computational creativity in a complex and multifaceted domain and enabling new kinds of playable experiences. This incorporation of computational creative labor confuses authorship, labor politics and responsibility for rhetoric embedded in the procedures by complicating the way in which the computer is portrayed to users, researchers and other developers. We can apply feminist methodologies attentive to questions of difference and power in systemic structures in order to better understand each of these questions in turn. This article presents an analysis of the post-anthropocentric phenomenon of computer creativity within games, via a feminist analysis of procedural content generating algorithms, its role in game design and its public portrayal.

KEYWORDS:

• Procedural content generation
• game studies
• computational creativity
• gender
• procedural rhetoric
• artificial intelligence

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the organizers of the 2015 Different Games conference (New York City, NY) for inviting all authors to participate on a panel, “Can Computers Be Feminist?”, that prompted this article. The authors also thank the staff at Schloss Dagstuhl and organizers of Dagstuhl seminar 15051, where initial ideas for this article first emerged, as well as the AIIDE Diversity in Games Research Workshop that provided funding for an English PhD to attend a computer science conference and begin talking about feminism with AI researchers. Finally, thank you to the anonymous reviewers and Josef Nguyen for providing feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Amanda Phillips is the IMMERSe Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Davis. Her work unites platform and software studies with feminist, queer, and critical race theory.

Gillian Smith is an Assistant Professor of Game Design and Computer Science at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the role of procedural content generation in game design, and women in technology.

Michael Cook is a Research Associate at Goldsmiths in the University of London. His AI system, ANGELINA, creates complete games and enters game jams.

Tanya Short is the Creative Director of Kitfox Games and co-founder of Pixelles Montreal. She has a history of building and reflecting on generative software, and writes extensively about procedural systems conveying meaning.

Notes

1 In fact, gender is key to defining personhood by many traditions, from common practices such as the revelation of a baby's sex before it is born or psychoanalytic theories that identify the recognition of sexual difference as a significant moment, at which subjectivity is determined.

2 For example, an evolutionary algorithm captures not only elements of self-criticism but also the notion of design as an optimization process, while a grammar-based approach poses that design is purely constructive, with no need for self-reflection. Similarly, the machine also is embedded with a formal theory for the fundamental definition of the product being designed, as the programmer must again make strong, formal commitments to the machine about what is included in the generative space of the system and what will be excluded.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the IMMERSe Network for Video Games Research (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and the UC Davis Interdisciplinary Frontiers in the Humanities and Arts.