Portrait of Johor Jara Gonzalez

I'm Johor Jara Gonzalez, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Alberta, an AI & video games researcher, and sometimes a game designer. I'm focused on automatic game design (AGD) and, more specifically, mechanics. So welcome to the Mechanic Garden space!

Mechanic Garden is my space for exploring AGD and game mechanics. I’m interested in how rules, generators, and players interact—and how we can build systems that design games, analyse them, and grow strange new forms of play.

Here you’ll find research notes, blog posts, toy experiments, and user studies—mostly around procedural generation, mechanics, and design spaces.

Recent News

Little status updates, announcements, and notes.

Nov 2025

Started setting up Mechanic Garden as a home for my work on automatic game design and mechanics, and a place to put some of my thinking.