Towards a generic method of evaluating game levels

This paper addresses the problem of evaluating the qual-ity of game levels across different games and even gen-res, which is of key importance for making procedural content generation and assisted game design tools more generally applicable. Three game design patterns are identified for having high generality while being easily quantifiable: area control, exploration and balance. For-mulas for measuring the extent to which a level includes these concepts are proposed, and evaluation functions are derived for levels in two different game genres: mul-tiplayer strategy game maps and single-player roguelike dungeons. To illustrate the impact of these evaluation functions, and the similarity of impact across domains, sets of levels for each function are generated using a constrained genetic algorithm. The proposed measures can easily be extended to other game genres