Generation and Evaluation in the Human Invention Process through the Lens of Game Design

The human ability to learn rules and solve problems has been a central concern of cognitive science research since the field's earliest days. But we do not just follow rules and solve problems given to us by others: we modify those rules, create new problems, and set new goals and tasks for ourselves and others. Arguably, even more than rule following and problem solving, human intelligence is about creatively breaking and stretching the rules, changing the game, and inventing new problems worth thinking about. Creating a good rule or a good problem depends not just on the ideas one can think up but on how one evaluates such proposals. Here, we study invention through the lens of game design. We focus particularly on the early stages of novice, "everyday" game creation, where the stakes are low. We draw on a dataset of over 450 human created games, created by participants who saw an initial seed set of two-player grid-based strategy games. We consider two different cognitive mechanisms that may be at work during the early processes of intuitive game invention: an associative proposal based on previous games one has seen and compute-bounded model-based evaluation that an everyday game creator may use to refine their initial draft proposals. In our preliminary work, we conduct a model-based analysis of how people invented new games based on prior experience and find that generated games are best described by a model which incorporates model-based estimates of game quality at a population level. Our work points to how human invention is based not only on what people propose, but how they evaluate and offers a computational toolkit to scale empirical studies of model-based simulation in open-ended human innovation.