This paper describes the social physics game Slice of Life.In Slice of Life, the player strives to achieve various social goals by choosing social interactions for characters to engage in.These interactions are governed by a social simulation system called Ensemble with Social Practices (ESP).The ways to achieve the player's social goals are numerous and any given playthrough of the game will result in drastically different social worlds.Slice of Life also makes use of the underlying social simulation system's detailed state to generate symbolically grounded prompts for a large language model (LLM) that generates context-appropriate character dialogue.Rather than using LLMs for novelty or for economic reasons, the underlying social simulation technology, we argue, necessitates this approach in order to make it feasible to have nuanced dialogue that reflects the many ways characters could have gotten themselves into particular social situations.The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed account of Slice of Life's design, how its social physics simulation enables interactive conversations based on social practices, and to illustrate how the generative possibilities of LLMs can be uniquely useful when applied as its natural language generation (NLG) system, without giving up authorial control of the gameplay or story.

This paper describes a prototype for the social physics game Slice of Life, and how it makes use of the underlying social simulation system’s sophisticated state to generate symbolically grounded prompts for a large language model (LLM) in order to generate context appropriate character dialogue. Rather than using LLMs for novelty or economic reasons, the underlying social simulation technology, we argue, necessitates this approach in order to make it feasible to have nuanced dialogue that reflects the many ways the characters could have gotten themselves into particular social situations. The primary goal of this paper is to illustrate how the generative possibilities of LLMs can be uniquely useful when applied as a controlled natural language generation (NLG) system, without giving up authorial control of the gameplay or story, or sacrificing accepted good game design practice.

Consider the set of games, which we'll call order-fulfillment games, where the player fulfills customers' orders in a food-service setting under time pressure. We will use BurgerTime (1982), Tapper (1983), Diner Dash (2004), and Overcooked (2016) as examples. We argue that, although these games don't form a genre per se, they form a coherent taxonomic grouping defined by their core game loop, thematic elements, and typical player experiences. That these games share similarities may seem obvious, but we have found it illuminating to dig into precisely how this grouping is constituted, where its boundaries lie, and how it overlaps with well-recognized game genres. Besides analyzing this grouping for its own sake, a secondary contribution of this paper is as a case study in applying two analytical tools that have been proposed but little applied: Lessard's high-level design pattern formations and Sicart's version of the core game loop.

Abstract—This paper presents Comme il Faut (CiF), an artifi-cial intelligence system thatmatches character performances to ap-propriate social context, with the goal of enabling authors to write high-level rules governing expected character behavior in given so-cial situations, rather than specific fixed choice points in a curated narrative structure. CiF models characters with a complex set of traits, feelings, and relationships, who can form intents, take ac-tions, relate to a shared cultural space, and remember and refer to past events. A set of authored rules encoding appropriate be-havior within a specific story world allow these characters to se-lect actions to take (and respond to actions by others) in a manner consistent with their own personal and social concerns as well as a shifting interpersonal context. Through the development and re-lease of PromWeek, a complete game using CiF as its narrative en-gine, we show how the system successfully creates complex narra-tives that are unique for each player and directed by those players’ attempts to make progress towards story goals. We also show how CiF continues to be used in several in-progress interactive experi-ences (Mismanor and IMMERSE), speaking to the utility and flex-ibility of its design. Index Terms—Artificial intelligence, emergent narrative, game design, interactive drama. I.

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.

Micro-rhetorics are the representational units of meaning that emerge from the rhetorical affordances of videogame mechanics, abstract gameplay patterns, and thematic depiction. This paper explains the concept of micro-rhetorics, how game dynamics can be interpreted, and how designers can make use of game mechanics to express ideas through simple videogames. This theoretical framework is informed by the design of Game-O-Matic, a videogame authoring tool that generates games to represent ideas. It takes a network of basic relationships between actors and assembles simple arcade-style game mechanics into videogames that are able to make arguments and depict ideas.

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 player's 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.

Newsgames and artgames, two genres in which designers wish to communicate messages to players, often deploy procedural representation. Understanding these proceduralist games requires special attention to a game's processes as well as how these interact with its theme and aesthetics. In this paper we present a method for proceduralist readings of arcade-like 2D games so that players can determine their range of intended and unintended meanings, critics can assess the strengths and weaknesses of the presented arguments, and designers can identify ways to refine their rhetorical strategies.

Launchpad is an autonomous level generator that is based on a formal model of 2-D platformer level design. Levels are built out of small segments called “rhythm groups,” which are generated using a two-tiered, grammar-based approach. These segments are pieced together into complete levels that are then rated according to a set of design heuristics. Generation can be controlled using a set of parameters that influence the level pacing and geometry. The approach minimizes the amount of content that must be manually authored: instead of piecing together large segments of a level, Launchpad uses base components that are commonly found in a number of 2-D platformers. Launchpad produces an impressive variety of levels which are all guaranteed to be playable.

This paper describes an explicit model for how to interpret and create simple 2D games that reasonably communicate messages through a game's 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 game's 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 Activision's 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.

We present a rhythm-based method for the automatic generation of levels for 2D platformers, where the rhythm is that which the player feels with his hands while playing. Levels are created using a grammar-based method: first generating rhythms, then generating geometry based on those rhythms. Generation is constrained by a set of style parameters tweakable by a human designer. The approach also minimizes the amount of content that must be manually authored, instead relying on geometry components that are included in the level designer's tileset and a set of jump types. Our results show that this method produces an impressive variety of levels, all of which are fully playable.