Towards Design Principles for Humor in Interactive Emergent Narrative


Chen Kenneth Rank Stefan
2018 DiGRA '18 - Proceedings of the 2018 DiGRA International Conference: The Game is the Message

Humor is an essential part of storytelling, but it has not been studied in the field of interactive emergent narrative. We begin with an overview of various theories of humor and use them to examine examples of humor within the digital media field. This juxtaposition aims to bring together concepts from both fields in order to find a feasible direction. We hope to contribute a framework of humor that can be used in the near future for an interactive emergent narrative project. Our conceptualization of humor frames it in terms of “pleasant surprises” which enable players and other emergent AI actors to stretch the boundaries between plot and discourse.

 

Ideological Narratives of Play in Tropico 4 and Crusader Kings II


Lucat Bertrand Haahr Mads
2015 DiGRA '15 - Proceedings of the 2015 DiGRA International Conference

Ideology and its function in digital games has received considerable scholarly interest in the field of game studies, though only more recently has criticism interested itself with the ideological implications of game mechanics in conjunction with a game's representational content. Relying on an Althusserian definition of ideology, this paper builds upon the existing methodology of procedural rhetoric to examine the ideological functions of serious games, before addressing the necessity for a process of ideological analysis suited to the vast majority of commercial digital games. Through the close study of two games, Tropico 4 (Haemimont Games 2011) and Crusader Kings II (Paradox Development Studio 2012), and the examination of their representational components, the game mechanics they deploy, and the emergent narratives that unfold during play, this paper works to lay the foundations for an analytical framework designed for the close ideological reading and analysis of popular digital games.

 

Testing the Power of Game Lessons: The Effects of Art and Narrative on Reducing Cognitive Biases


Martey Rosa Shaw Adrienne Stromer-Galley Jennifer Kenski Kate Clegg Benjamin Folkestad James Saulnier Emilie Strzalkowski Tomek
2014 DiGRA '14 - Proceedings of the 2014 DiGRA International Conference

Educational games have proliferated, but questions remain about the effectiveness at teaching both in the short- and long-term. Also unclear is whether particular game features have positive effects on learning. To examine these issues, this paper describes a controlled experiment using an educational game that was professionally developed to teach about cognitive biases in decision making (Fundamental Attribution Error, Confirmation Bias, and Bias Blind Spot). This experiment examined the effects of game art and narrative on learning and compared the game conditions to a training video. Effects were measured immediately after the stimuli were given and then again eight weeks later. Results indicate that the educational game outperforms the training video immediately after exposure and that there are significant retention effects. Art and narrative were not significantly related to learning with the exception that minimal art game had a significant positive relationship with mitigating Bias Blind Spot at immediate post-test.

 

Ludology, Narratology and Philosophical Hermeneutics


Arjoranta Jonne, Karhulahti Veli-Matti
2014 DiGRA Nordic '14: Proceedings of the 2014 International DiGRA Nordic Conference

In this article we present the hermeneutic method as a tool for analyzing game studies discourses. We use Markku Eskelinen’s profusely interpreted “The Gaming Situation” (2001) as a case study. Our premise is that whereas the hermeneutic method is academically well-established, its conscious application is not. It is suggested that with conscious application of the hermeneutic method the persistent and problematic questions in game studies, like those related to narrative, definition, and art, gain potential to be treated with increased sophistication.

 

The Game’s Afoot: Designing Sherlock Holmes


Fernández-Vara Clara
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

A videogame based on the Sherlock Holmes’ stories by Arthur Conan Doyle is an interesting design challenge, which commercial games have tackled only half-heartedly. This paper discusses this challenge by examining the game design strategies across pre-existing games, then proposes a new set of strategies that would help players become the dweller of 221B Baker Street. The design critique of the games focuses on the actions available to players to become a detective, and the aspects of the interactivity that invite the player to become Sherlock Holmes. The suggested design strategies to encourage detective work are based on prompts from the original stories, such as disguising oneself, doing chemical analyses, or turning the process of deduction into game mechanics.

 

Game Spaces Speak Volumes: Indexical Storytelling


Fernández-Vara Clara
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

In the problematic exploration of the narrative potential of videogames, one of the clearest aspects that bridge stories and games is space. This paper examines the different devices that videogames have used to incorporate stories through spatial design and what is known as environmental storytelling, focusing on the design elements that make the story directly relevant to gameplay beyond world-building and backstory exposition. These design-related elements are accounted for with the term indexical storytelling. As a refinement of the concept of environmental storytelling, indexical storytelling is a productive game design device, since reading the space of the game and learning about the events that have taken place in it are required to traverse the game successfully. Storytelling becomes a game of story-building, since the player has to piece together the story, or construct a story of her own interaction in the world by leaving a trace.

 

End of story? Quest, narrative and enactment in computer games


Løvlie Anders Sundnes
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Espen Aarseth recently claimed that all games referred to as ’narrative games’ could better be described as ’quest games’. The writer of this paper suggests that Max Payne is a possible counter-example to this hypothesis; i.e. a game with a strong focus on narrative which is not easily understood as a quest game. The writer suggests that this, and other similar games, could better be understood in terms of a theory of ’enactment’, which is seen as related to, but not similar to theatrical acting. Extending this idea, the concept of ’the estrangement effect’ in theatre theory is used to analyze a collection of small computer games from the perspective of theory about ”serious games”.

 

The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation


Gomes Renata
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper proposes a concept of narrative as the design of an immersive simulation to be experienced by the interactor in a video game. We face this narrative status as the ongoing shift of a process faced with the nature of the video game format: in one side, the immersive nature of character-oriented games, and on the other, the simulative nature of god games and such. We believe the combination of these two features allows for the emergence of a new and promising narrative game format.