Play Arcs: Structuring Player Stories for CoDesign & Content Generation in Persistent Game Worlds

Players of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) consume content much faster than game designers can produce it. However, they also generate stories through their interaction, which can contribute to adding novel types of content in the game world. We introduce and demonstrate Play Arcs, a design strategy for structuring emergent stories that players can codesign and contribute as unique game content. We develop an MMO with tools for codesign and ‘history game mechanics’ and test as a technology probe with 49 players. We show that Play Arcs successfully structure coherent stories and support players in shaping new, unique content based on their own histories. We found that these stories can inform and guide players’ decisions, and also that, while players often share simpler stories directly, they keep more notable stories to themselves for retelling later. We conclude by discussing design challenges and directions for future work with Play Arcs.

Procedural Content Generation, Player Agency, and Playfulness in Survival- Crafting Game Astroneer

The explosive and still very much soaring success of Minecraft (Persson 2011) accelerated the proliferation of sandbox games based on the mechanics of exploration, crafting, building, and ultimately, survival. Hit titles Space Engineers (Keen Software House 2013) or Subnautica (Unknown Worlds 2018) afford gameplay that is, in many ways, less constricted than in other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. In fact, notions of freedom and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This paper interrogates the implications survival-crafting games’ design has for player agency. As part of a larger project looking at agency in a variety of avatar-based genres, this paper draws on previous scholarship framing player action as an affordance of game design (Juul 2005; Salen and Zimmermann 2004; Sicart 2008), and conceptualizes agency as the possibility space for player action as expressed through avatar action that manifests in multiple dimensions (cf. Calleja 2011).

Preliminary Poetics of Procedural Generation in Games

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is deeply embedded in many games. While there are many taxonomies of the applications of PCG, less attention has been given to the poetics of PCG. In this paper we present a poetics for generative systems, including a descriptive framework that introduces terms for complex systems (Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos), the form that describes the shape of the generated output (formal gestalt, individual, and repetition), the locus of the generative process (structure, surface, or locus gestalt), the kind of variation the generator uses (style, multiplicity, and cohesion) and the relationship between coherence and the content used as input for the generator. Rather than being mutually exclusive categories, generators can be considered to exhibit aspects of all of these at once.

Exploration of Open Data through Procedural Content Generation

Playing with Data: Procedural Generation of Adventures from Open Data

This paper investigates how to generate simple adventure games using open data. We present a system that creates a plot for the player to follow based on associations between Wikipedia articles which link two given topics (in this case people) together. The Wikipedia articles are transformed into game objects (locations, NPCs and items) via constructive algorithms that also rely on geographical information from OpenStreetMaps and visual content from Wikimedia Commons. The different game objects generated in this fashion are linked together via clues which point to one another, while additional false clues and dead ends are added to increase the exploration value of the final adventure game. This information is presented to the user via a set of game screens and images. Inspired by the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” adventure game, the end result is a generator of chains of followable clues.

A Procedural Critique of Deontological Reasoning

This paper describes a prototype game that learns its rules from the actions and commands of the player. This game can be seen as an implementation and procedural critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, suggesting to the player that (1) the maxim of an action is in general underdetermined by the action and its context, so that an external observer will more often than not get the underlying maxim wrong, and that (2) most ingame actions are morally “wrong” in the sense that they do not contribute to wellbalanced game design. But it can also be seen as an embryo for an authoring tool for game designers, where they can easily and fluidly prototype new game mechanics.