Beep! Beep! Boom!

Abstract

In current commercial games, there is generally a lack of physical humor; most humor in games is largely linguistic (dialog) and static (hand-authored). In this paper we propose A Cartoon Making Experience (ACME), a system that models physical humor based on the structure of humorous episodes in The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons. Player's are able to interact with ACME by adding and removing objects from the world. Using a hierarchal task network (HTN) planner, the game plans out a gag based on the item attributes as well as the state of the world. In this paper we provide an analysis of the humor in The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons, position ACME in the context of work on computational humor, and describe our preliminary implementation of ACME.