Ben Samuel

Prom Week : social physics as gameplay

In this paper, we present Prom Week, a social simulation game about the interpersonal lives of a group of high school students in the week leading up to their prom. By starting the design of the game with a theory of social interaction, Prom Week is able to present satisfying stories that reflect the players choices in a wide possibility space -- two features that rarely accompany one another. This paper reports the design details of how Prom Week utilizes social physics to achieve rich character specificity while maintaining a highly dynamic story space.

Comme il Faut 2 : a fully realized model for socially-oriented gameplay

Social games---common patterns of character interactions that modify the social environment of the story world---provide a useful abstraction when authoring a story composed of interactive characters, making it possible to create games with deep possibility spaces that are about social interaction (which would be intractable if hand-authoring all the options). In this paper, we detail the workings of a major new version of our social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut, that enables social game play in interactive media experiences. The workings of Comme il Faut 2 are shown, with running examples, from both knowledge representation and process perspectives. Finally, the paper concludes with a plan for evaluating and demonstrating Comme il Faut 2 through an implementation of an interactive media experience that consists of a playable social space.

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.

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.