REPORTS

Authors: Alicia Fortier, Alexander “Droqen” Clair Tseu Martin, Tanya X. Short, Alexei Pepers, Kaitlin Tremblay, Linsey Murdock 🤔How to Use this Paper This paper is offered as a lens for you to (re)consider your game systems and how they might benefit from disobedient agents.  Our focus for this paper is on how the game and its agents or systems can be disobedient towards the player. This is a tricky balancing act; often in games players have the expectation of total control, and to undermine that can be very provoking. We offer a lens of analysis and understanding of how different forms of system ‘disobedience’ lend a distinctive depth of flavor to a game – like a unit that refuses an action (instead of failing it), or a creature that prioritizes its own needs over a player command. This paper serves as a tool for reflection on where you might want to prepare for flexibility in your input-output systems in ways that can have the most impact to create the appropriate illusion of disobedience and related benefits. As most senior designers and producers have experienced, flexibility can be very difficult to add to systems later in production; it is thus in...

Observations and resources for game designers seeking to tell stories in highly dynamic games Workgroup Members Introduction Our group discussed techniques, approaches, and common obstacles around interactive storytelling, specifically with regard to combining interesting and highly dynamic gameplay systems with effective and coherent storytelling. Game designers have used games to tell stories since the dawn of the medium. While we continue to make advances – and dynamic storytelling in games has become quite sophisticated in some cases – we feel there is still significant unexplored potential for better integration of story and systems in games. This paper discusses several approaches, case studies, lenses, pitfalls, and obstacles related to interactive storytelling. Games referenced herein are not meant to exhaustively represent a particular approach or technique, but rather merely to illustrate by example. Storylets and Dynamic Casting A common storytelling technique in games is activating bits of narrative content, such as scenes or individual lines of dialogue, based on conditions, such as the state of the game world or previous decisions made by the player. This technique is often referred to as storylets, for scenes, or barks or reactive dialogue, for lines of dialogue. This section describes some considerations around this approach,...

Group Contributors Abhi, Chandana Ekanayake, Rayla Heide, Steven Lumpkin, William Chyr, Xalavier Nelson Jr Introduction At Polaris 2024, our group set out to build a shared framework for helping designers create emotionally resonant game mechanics, especially in novel contexts.  In our efforts to do so, first we established some vocabulary, then looked at existing tools for considering emotions.  Following that, we developed a set of questions that a designer can ask themselves to help in working through the process of creating a new emotionally resonant mechanic.  Along the way we discovered a wealth of existing games that serve as exemplars in the field in each context we examined.  In this paper, we attempt to lay this out in such a way that designers reading have access to our thoughts and methodologies; ultimately, we’re hopeful this framework will be a valuable tool to you in creating new emotionally resonant mechanics, or digging deeper into the emotional valence of the mechanics and systems you’ve already built. Vocabulary and Framing In order to have a more productive discussion, we first wanted to align on a shared vocabulary and framing; we came to this primarily because we wanted to make sure we drew our...

JC Lau, Elaine Gusella, Ian Schrieber, Daniel Cook 1. What is this all about? If, as Sid Meier has famously said, “a game is a series of interesting decisions”, then a co-op game is a series of interesting collective decisions. We define a “collective decision” as a situation where some kind of decision must be made by two or more players together, with each player able to influence the decision and the result is a shared outcome. Think of it as “decision-by-committee.”  When building multiplayer co-op games, designers encounter a wide variety of decision-making mechanisms that they can implement in their games. Yet there is very little written on the topic. Certainly one can find lots of real-world discussion on voting or election systems, but in practice these are rather rare in games. Game-centric decision-making systems don’t look like politics as taught in school; instead they look like how an adventuring party in an MMO decides which direction to walk or which quest to initiate. What is this not about? We are intentionally limiting the scope of this paper to collective decisions among players in games. While collective decisions do exist outside of games (examples include political elections, deliberating on...

Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, Andreia Gonçalves, Chelsea Howe, Natasha Miller, May Ling Tan Goal This paper aims to explore the variables and design decisions that go into creating games where players can impact each others’ experiences. This paper favours pro-social solutions that enable high-risk mechanics and provides development recommendations that mitigate risk factors to get the most value out of social gameplay – for players, developers, and businesses. It is important to acknowledge that this is an ongoing and developing topic, and more work needs to be done to ensure our social spaces are vibrant and safe. Why is this Important? Overall, we believe that social gameplay benefits players, developers, and the broader world. Promoting more methods and avenues of prosocial self and group expression increases the retention potential of a game. In a study of adolescents, creative self-expression is shown to lead to increased self-esteem, extraversion, and openness to experiences. Students when encouraged to be creative in expressing themselves were found to have more energy or enthusiasm, more ingenuity or mental openness, as well as less negative affect or nervousness. From a report published using game data extracted from Steam Workshop, the retention potential for UGC-based games is 64% higher than...