Rui Craveirinha

Looking for the heart of interactive media: reflections on video games' emotional expression

Ever since they first originated, video games have been perceived as an inferior form of media expression. One major concern has been that they do not seem able to elicit a wide spectrum of emotions, thus being perceived as emotionally shallow. Sustained by a theoretical overview of the nature of play activities and studies on emotion elicitation by video games, this paper hypothesizes on a relationship between certain elements of traditional games and subsequent elicited emotions. From these ensue concerns regarding the narrow spectre of emotions elicited by certain prototypical game structures employed by the game design process.

Designing Games with Procedural Content Generation: An Authorial Approach

This paper describes the design of a novel approach to procedural content generation, intent on supporting game design activities. The distinctive factor in this approach is that content generation is guided by a series of target experience indicators, which the designer can define freely according to his own agenda. We detail its underlying concepts and procedural logic, as well as its purported benefits, and outline early experiments in the design process of a prototype.

Designing a Creature Believability Scale for Videogames

This paper describes the design, and early evaluation of a scale aimed at assessing the believability of creatures in videogames. These creatures include all zoomorphic entities that do not qualify as fundamentally human-like, whether or not they have characteristics identifiable as anthropomorphic. The work is based on principles drawn from biology, animation, illustration and artificial intelligence. After developing the scale’s 46 original items, it was administrated as a Likert Scale questionnaire. The results were analyzed through Principal Component Analysis and they suggest that 26 items, out of the original 46, spread across 4 dimensions, could be used to evaluate creature believability.

Towards a Taxonomy for the Clarification of PCG Actors' Roles

This work proposes a novel classification system that clarifies the multiple role configurations in the context of video-game design production involving use of Procedural Content Generation (PCG) methods. Specifically, the role that designers can have, either by the direct PCG-game design or via interaction with PCG-tools, and its consequent impact on PCGs output. Towards this effect, a taxonomy is specified that synthesizes existing PCG taxonomies so that it lists all possible roles and impact that each actor - the Human Designer, the Computational Algorithm and the Human Player Can have in PCGs evaluation and generation processes.

Studying an Author-Oriented Approach to Procedural Content Generation through Participatory Design

The paper describes the design research process of a procedural content generation tool aimed at supporting creative game design processes. An author oriented approach to procedural content generation tools is used where these tools can be manipulated so as to let authors define the design space they want to explore and the design solution they wish to find, therefore maintaining their creative agenda intact. We present two Participatory Design exercises where game designers were tasked with creating a complete Interface Design for an implementation of this approach. Content Analysis from participants’ discourse during these design exercises showed two important results. First, designers have trouble understanding how this procedural content generation works, and how to express their design problem within its conceptual framework. Second, subjects were averse to a pure optimization led approach to content generation and suggested the need for an exploratory phase, where content is created only to grasp the design landscape, without having to specifically define the desired solution.

Exploring the Design-Space: The Authorial Game Evolution Tool Case-Study

This paper describes a case-study on the use of AGE, the Authorial Game Evolution approach, a creativity support tool designed to assist game designers. AGE allows designers to conduct a systematic process of generation and evaluation of game-prototypes, as well as automatically evolve a game-prototype until it mediates a desired form of game-play experience. To assess the tool, a design case study was held where a designer used AGE to create a game. We used a convergent mixed methods experimental design, and analysed quantitative and qualitative data resulting from four design sessions. Creativity Support Index self-report shows the designer found AGE very good in supporting his design, especially for exploration of the design-space. However, he appropriated it exclusively for exploration, not optimization. These show AGE has potential for exploring the design-space, though issues remain before it is an effective medium for high-quality designs.

The blindfold soundscape game: a case for participation-centered gameplay experience design and evaluation

In this paper we report on a game design exercise that focus on the sensoriality and sensemaking participant dimensions for conceiving and evaluating gameplay experience, by framing design intentions, artifact characteristics and user participation. Through this exercise we were able to build understandings of user participation in the soundscape constituting the gameplay scenario. By employing a goal-question-metric approach we demonstrated the viability of using the participation-centric gameplay model dimensions as a basis for the synthesis of gameplay participation indicators and metrics, and their analysis in the context of interactions with a game as soundscape.