Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Polymorph: dynamic difficulty adjustment through level generation

Players begin games at different skill levels and develop their skill at different rates so that even the best-designed games are uninterestingly easy for some players and frustratingly difficult for others. A proposed answer to this challenge is Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA), a general category of approaches that alter games during play, in response to player performance. However, nearly all these techniques are focused on basic parameter tweaking, while the difficulty of many games is connected to aspects that are more challenging to adjust dynamically, such as level design. Further, most DDA techniques are based on designer intuition, which may not reflect actual play patterns. Responding to these challenges, we present Polymorph, which employs techniques from level generation and machine learning to understand game component difficulty and player skill, dynamically constructing a 2D platformer game with continually-appropriate challenge. We believe this will create a play experience that is unique because the changes are both personalized and structural, while also providing an example of a promising new research and development approach.

Mining game statistics from web services: a World of Warcraft armory case study

Collecting large sets of quantitative video game play data can take many months or years. This delays the progress of interpreting data and drawing interesting conclusions. Mining game data from publicly accessible web services allows us to quickly retrieve quantitative results. This will allow the pace of quantitative research in video games to increase, as well as provide pointers towards maximizing the efficiency of future qualitative study.

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.

PCG-based game design: creating Endless Web

This paper describes the creation of the game Endless Web, a 2D platforming game in which the players actions determine the ongoing creation of the world she is exploring. Endless Web is an example of a PCG-based game: it uses procedural content generation (PCG) as a mechanic, and its PCG system, Launchpad, greatly influenced the aesthetics of the game. All of the players strategies for the game revolve around the use of procedural content generation. Many design challenges were encountered in the design and creation of Endless Web, for both the game and modifications that had to be made to Launchpad. These challenges arise largely from a loss of fine-grained control over the players experience; instead of being able to carefully craft each element the player can interact with, the designer must instead craft algorithms to produce a range of content the player might experience. In this paper we provide a definition of PCG-based game design and describe the challenges faced in creating a PCG-based game. We offer our solutions, which impacted both the game and the underlying level generator, and identify issues which may be particularly important as this area matures.

What went wrong: a taxonomy of video game bugs

Video games are complex, emergent systems that are difficult to design and test. This difficulty invariably leads to failures being present in the game, negatively impacting the play experience of some. We present a taxonomy of possible failures, divided into temporal and non-temporal failures. The taxonomy can guide the thinking of designers and testers alike, helping them expose bugs in the game. This will lead to games being better tested and designed, with fewer failures when released.

Perceived or not perceived: film character models for expressive NLG

This paper presents a method for learning models of character linguistic style from a corpus of film dialogues and tests the method in a perceptual experiment. We apply our method in the context of SpyFeet, a prototype role playing game. In previous work, we used the Personage engine to produce restaurant recommendations that varied according to the speakers personality. Here we show for the first time that: (1) our expressive generation engine can operate on content from the story structures of an RPG; (2) Personage parameter models can be learned from film dialogue; (3) Personage rule-based models for extraversion and neuroticism are be perceived as intended in a new domain (SpyFeet character utterances); and (4) that the parameter models learned from film dialogue are generally perceived as being similar to the character that the model is based on. This is the first step of our long term goal to create off-the-shelf tools to support authors in the creation of interesting dramatic characters and dialogue partners, for a broad range of types of interactive stories and role playing games.

Rules of engagement: moving beyond combat-based quests

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) are known for their strong narrative structure. Over time, quests have become one of the main mechanics for leading a player through the story. Quests are given to the player in the form of a set of tasks to complete with few, if any, options. The options given to the player instead often revolve around combat-oriented actions -- requiring the player to engage in combat to progress through the storyline, despite player preference or game story that hints otherwise. We address this issue with the GrailGM, a run-time game master which offers quests and actions to the player based on their history and current world state.

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.

Kaboom! is a many-splendored thing: an interpretation and design methodology for message-driven games using graphical logics

This paper describes an explicit model for how to interpret and create simple 2D games that reasonably communicate messages through a games representational layer in a manner that is consistent with its processes. A few prominent experimental games (e.g. Kabul Kaboom, Passage) have demonstrated that when the rhetorical implications of a games processes and its representational layer are in harmony, worthwhile and coherent messages can be communicated. This paper reports the findings of an extensive analysis of Activisions Kaboom! (1981) [1] that explores its rhetorical design space in the service of developing a general method for the interpretation of simple message-driven games. The paper then shows how the application of this method to even a simple game like Kaboom! reveals an unexpected range of coherent potential messages. The paper concludes with a description of a design process and assistant tool that enables those who are not game designers, or even procedurally literate, to create simple games that present editorial and expressive statements. We see this project as a concrete step forward, both analytically and in enabling production, in the field of procedural rhetoric.