Procedural Content Generation for Cooperative Games—A Systematic Review

In this article, we conduct a systematic review on procedural content generation (PCG) for cooperative games. Our main goal was exploring the state of the art in this area of research, and, in particular, its application to level generation for cooperative games. Another objective was determining how generating content for cooperative games could be different from generating content for other types of games. Our results showed a lack of research in this particular application of PCG. Despite this, we found a variety of use cases of PCG for cooperative games, most of them related to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">autonomous generation</i> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">co-creative and mixed-initiative design</i>. In addition, we found a variety of methods and techniques being used to generate levels for cooperative games that covered the broad categories we used to condense this information. Concerning the differences between generating content for cooperative games and generating content for other types of games, the studies we found suggested that PCG for cooperative games should take into account the design specificities of cooperative games—the types of tasks, cooperative game design patterns and game mechanics used to incentivize and support cooperative gameplay.