Aaron A. Reed

Prom week

Prom Week places players in a typical high-school, abuzz with excitement over the upcoming prom. Players indirectly sculpt the social landscape by having these hapless highschoolers engage in social exchanges with each other. The results of these social exchanges are many and varied---ranging from mild fluctuations in respect to characters professing their eternal love for one another---and are informed by over 5,000 sociocultural considerations encoded in first order logic. Through massaging the interpersonal relationships and learning the personal intricacies of the characters, the player can solve a series of social puzzles; such as making the class-nerd the Prom King, or bringing peace between feuding jocks and preppies.

Playing with words: from intuition to evaluation of game dialogue interfaces

Dialogue systems are central to role-playing games, adventure games, interactive fictions, and some forms of interactive drama and cinema---but we have little empirical evidence about how, or even whether, the design of dialogue system interfaces shapes gameplay experience. In this paper we present the results of a study directly comparing three different dialogue system interfaces implemented over the complete course of a dramatic, story-focused game. We find that, holding the rest of the game steady, changing the dialogue interface produces significant changes in gameplay experience. Further, these changes shape perceptions of the system well beyond the interface and its operation. The changes are also sometimes resonant with, and sometimes at odds with, conventional wisdom about these interface options in the game design and writing communities. Our study compared three interfaces: a sentence selection interface (which appears to maximize story involvement), an abstract response menu interface (which maximized reasoning about the underlying game structures), and a natural language understanding interface (which maximized a sense of presence and engagement with the overall experience). Our full results provide valuable future guidance for those seeking a dialogue interface that is resonant with their gameplay experience goals.

SpyFeet: an exercise RPG

One compelling aspect of computer RPGs is the promise of player agency: the ability to make significant and desired choices in a large, complex, and story-rich environment. Giving players meaningful choice has traditionally required the creation of tremendous amounts of hand-authored story content. This authoring paradigm tends to introduce both structural and workload problems for RPG designers. Our hypothesis is that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, both requiring advancement in three distinct areas: (1) dynamic story management architecture that allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices; (2) dynamic dialogue generation which takes history and relationships into account; and (3) an authoring interface that lets writers focus on quests and characters. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis.