With advances in generative AI, game designers can delegate some of a game’s procedural logic to an AI model, potentially enabling new dynamic play experiences. But the inability for a designer to consistently control a model’s behavior means the biases of these models can manifest in the game in unexpected ways. In this paper, we analyze how LLMs and game rules intersect to produce gameplay that is shaped by the biases of the language model. We draw on data studies to trace the ways that language models take on specific ideological commitments through their training, including biases along lines of race, gender, language, religion, geography, and more. Using Soraya Murray’s framing of games as playable representations and Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, we analyze how the play dynamics of language model interactions are shaped by these commitments. Through case studies of Infinite Craft and 1001 Nights, we argue that LLM-driven gameplay can produce implicit rhetoric encouraging players to accept the model’s underlying beliefs by rewarding the player for adopting them. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for future generative AI-based games, arguing for greater criticality in their design.

Our demo showcases a choice-based interactive narrative game created to teach responsible conduct of research and research ethics. It re-imagines the experience of a game previously published in the literature, using a content-selection system that dynamically constructs dialogue choices during play. Our goal is to provide players with more opportunities to experience agency than they would have with the original game’s hand-authored branching narrative structure. Primarily, our system implements a conversation thread-switching mechanic that allows players to fluidly enter/exit conversation topics as one would in a real-life conversation.

Visual novels are a popular game genre for educational games. However, they often feature pre-authored plot structures that cannot dynamically adjust to the player’s progression through learning objectives. Employing procedural storytelling techniques boosts plot dynamism, but this comes at the cost of needing a larger repository of content (dialogue and images) to support different learning progressions and objectives. In this paper, we present postmortem-style case studies describing the lessons we learned from attempting to integrate large-language models (LLMs) and text-to-image models into the development of an educational visual novel about responsible conduct of research. Specifically, we discuss our experiences employing generative AI in our dialogue, character sprite, and background image creation processes.

NPCs in video games play an essential role in player immersion and maintaining the world’s narrative. NPCs are highlighted in many game genres and systems, but are paramount in faction-based games such as Word of Warcraft, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 [6, 9, 35]. Most faction games use representative or primary characters that rely on heavy scripting to maintain their character believability, while background NPCs that constitute a faction have little to no role in many of these games. Both the experience with these primary NPCs and the experience with background NPCs can be improved by incorporating insights from two sources: character believability research and examining the portrayal of factions in other forms of media. This paper will provide a taxonomy and analysis of current faction systems and suggest methods of improvement.

In this paper, we perform a postmortem of Paradise, a prototype game we built to explore the potential of using a social simulation to structure language model-driven gameplay. We describe our experience using the Ensemble social physics engine and extending its architecture with GPT-3. We detail our resultant hybrid simulation system, in which the simulation state informs generated dialogue, and generated dialogue informs the simulation state. We note that authoring behavior for this system was unmanageable, entailing an unstable balancing act between prompt engineering, the Ensemble social model, and the mapping between the two. We conclude by sharing our reflections on what we learned from the project; we hope this postmortem will be valuable to others researching social physics and language models in games.

Text-to-image models such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney have seen a boom in development and adoption in both commercial and hobbyist spaces. This paper is a theoretical analysis aimed at informing the development of games that help improve critical literacy around text-to-image models. It asks: what assumptions and perspectives do text-to-image models have on visual creativity, and how do we bring that out through games? We propose a theory to differentiate between seeing an image through the expression of color, shapes and lines, and seeing an image through the recognition of concepts and ideas. These two ways of seeing are two different ways of orienting the player/user to their visual creativity. While traditional painting mechanics emphasize the former, text-to-image interfaces emphasize the latter. We deploy this perspective to study games with traditional painting interactions and games with text-to-image interactions. This paper hopes to contribute to design both broadly for games about visual creativity, and narrowly for gameplay with text-to-image models — specifically, how the latter fosters a different type of visual creativity than traditional painting interactions.

In creative roleplaying games, game masters take on many roles, including keeping track of the game’s story, remembering past actions, and improvising new content based on player choices and desires. This dynamic storytelling can be quite difficult, particularly in real-time play, and this paper explores how digital tools might be able to assist GMs with elements of this process. In particular, we explore issues that game masters experience in running the GUMSHOE One-2-One system by analyzing posts from the online role playing game community, and discuss the design of a digital tool that helps to address common problems. The resulting tool, Shoelace, helps game masters keep track of story events with a graph-based game world visualization, while also providing creative suggestions using Prolog queries over a database of game information.

The term ‘believability’, when referring to game characters, is used in two incompatible ways: realism, meaning human-like, and character believability as used in the character arts (the illusion of life). The same term being used for two different concepts leads to confusion and inconsistent use of language in research communities. This paper examines the different research areas that cluster under realism and character believability, and then performs a deeper exploration of character believability, focusing on characteristics, examples, and evaluation methodologies.

Tabletop role-playing games require game masters to mediate between the desires of a group of players and the affordances of a mechanically rich game world. In this paper, we explore the potential for large language models like GPT-3 to assist with the improvisational needs of a game master. We build upon Shoelace, a computational assistant for the GUMSHOE One-2-One role-playing framework; using GPT-3, we extend Shoelace to provide dialogue suggestions for non-player characters as well as to highlight relevant game module information. We emphasize the potential for language models to facilitate new role-playing tools and mechanics and suggest that the user experience problems presented by language models and role-playing are still underexplored and unresolved.

In tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), game masters (GMs) facilitate creating an improvisational shared story, responding in real time to the actions that players take and the things that they want to see in the world. In order to examine the process by which GMs co-create such player-driven narratives, we conduct interviews with GMs about their process preparing for and running TTRPG campaigns. We qualitatively code these interviews in order to synthesize a list of techniques GMs can use to move the story forward. We also compare these interviews to other sources of advice for GMing in sourcebooks and essays. Using the GMing techniques found through this analysis, we discuss insights into the GMing process and how this can be used to inform the design of a computational assistant for GMs.

Games are able to convey meaning that influences players’ beliefs and attitudes via their mechanics (aka “procedural rhetoric”), but recent work suggests that this is likely to be effective only when combined with traditional ways of conveying meaning (e.g., music, imagery, narrative, etc.). To investigate the specific component of rhetorical influence that comes from game mechanics, we constructed a city management strategy game that allowed us to independently vary narrative framing and game rules. We found that players perceived this game to be making an argument, but that player interpretations of this argument and the game’s influence on their attitudes were not necessarily consistent with our intended message. When players had the option to make policy choices within the game, their decisions appeared to be driven more by what game mechanics rewarded rather than by their real-world policy preferences. However, the actions that they took within the game did predict changes in those policy preferences after play. This was true only when the narrative framing of the game matched the real world policy context. This implies that procedural rhetoric is most effective when supported by other ways of conveying meaning, and that understanding the psychological impact of game mechanics requires paying attention to the moment to moment choices that players make within a game.

We present Why Are We Like This? (WAWLT), a mixed-initiative, co-creative storytelling game in which two players develop a story transcript by selecting and editing actions to perform and narrativize in an ongoing simulation. In this paper, we lay out the major technical features of WAWLT’s AI architecture—including story sifting via Datalog queries, social simulation, action suggestions, and player-specified but system-understandable author goals—and discuss how these features work together to produce a play experience that facilitates player creativity.

Concepts utilizing applied ethics, such as responsible conduct of research (RCR), can prove difficult to teach due to the complexity of problems faced by researchers and the many underlying perspectives involved in such dilemmas. To address this issue, we created Academical, a choice-based interactive storytelling game for RCR education that enables players to experience a story from multiple perspectives. In this paper, we describe the design rationale of Academical, and present results from an initial study comparing it with traditional web-based educational materials from an existing university RCR course. The results highlight that utilizing a choice-based interactive story game is more effective for RCR education, with learners developing significantly higher engagement, stronger overall moral reasoning skills, and better knowledge scores for certain RCR topics.

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of games as sites of collaborative game world creation. By this, we mean the processes in games by which players take on a dual role as player within the game world and maker of the game world, sharing authorship of the world and its design with the game's designers and other players. We explore several examples of games featuring game world co-creation at the core of their gameplay, and use this to create a model for understanding the commonalities across these various games and how they facilitate this collaborative process. By examining similar structures in the design and play of these games, we can better understand how to identify this process in existing games and how to better create games that allow for this in the future.

Game scholars make arguments that depend on the idea that games are capable of conveying meaning and making arguments via their mechanics, an information channel unique to games (and other forms of system-driven media) which Bogost has termed "procedural rhetoric." This concept is not intended to just be an interpretive technique for experts, but is also meant to describe the way the general player population experiences games. However, there has never (to our knowledge) been any attempt to use the tools of psychology to ascertain whether procedural rhetoric is a psychological reality for players in general and, if so, under what circumstances and in which ways it is experienced. This paper reports on the first steps in such an investigation. We found (a) that procedural rhetoric has psychological reality, with players accurately understanding that two games meant to have arguments have them, and the purely abstract game we included did not; (b) the understanding of procedural rhetoric appears to be strongly shaped by accompanying media, with the more abstract of the rhetorical games we studied much less clearly understood; and (c) as with any media, even when audiences understand the goal of a procedural rhetoric argument, the impact on their thoughts and feelings may not be as authors intend.

Choice-driven narratives, such as those created through systems like Twine, are a compelling form of interactive storytelling that have been around for many years. But as long as this form has existed, it has grappled with a persistent design problem: consistently presenting choices that feel both effective and relevant. Brute force can achieve the desired effect, but usually at the cost of prohibitively high authorial burden. To tackle this, generative approaches, such as Mawhorter's Dunyazad, facilitate authoring procedural choice content for reuse and recombination. However, many such systems, while successful on technical levels, have yet to to be used to author large enough structures to support a full game, and require a high technical threshold for authors to use. To further development in this space, we present StoryAssembler, an open source generative narrative system that creates dynamic choice-driven narratives. It formed a critical part of Emma's Journey, an interactive narrative game, the initial version of which was collaboratively authored by a team of six writers. In the course of the game's creation, useful authoring patterns and design lessons were learned, as well as techniques that made the system approachable for first-time users.

While there has been work in interactive narrative built using theory and practice from theater, it has mostly focused on the structure of narrative and how a player's interaction with the plot alters that structure. How a player interacts has usually been tied to common game interaction paradigms. There is an understanding that a videogame player exists somewhere between an audience member and a stage actor---but rarely are players allowed to express themselves in a manner similar to an actor. This paper argues that the acting and directing knowledge of theater is a potentially bountiful resource for designing player and NPC interactions. To illustrate this, the paper presents a literature review of theatrical methodology, its existing relationship to games, and a survey of projects in the interactive narrative and character interaction spaces. The chosen theater practices provide a useful basis for a new type of interaction between players and non-player characters. Additionally, particularly when looking at acting practices, their major concerns with the relationship between character and actor provide useful language to describe and further explore the relationship between the player and their avatar. Finally, this paper proposes one possible way of building systems to encourage new modes of play and alter the relationship between designers, systems, and players.

This paper presents a case study in the experience-first prototyping of a generative game. Our goal in this process was to create a PCG-based mystery story construction game ncentered on a social simulation of characters and their motivations, and driven by a set of core themes and experiences we wanted players to encounter. In pursuit of this goal, we created a series of prototypes to test how a variety of generative and AI-based techniques---including character generation, character action suggestion based on game state, story sifting, and social simulation---may be used in support of collaborative storytelling. In this paper we catalogue these prototypes and what we have learned by creating them, detailing design elements we found to be successful in supporting player creativity and that may be useful to the developers of similar games and experiences going forward.

Most discussions of procedural content generation have focused primarily on the artifacts that generators produce or the process by which these artifacts are created. Less focus, however, has been placed on the methods by which generators interpret their input. Many generators take complex input, act as part of a generative pipeline, are part of a mixed-initiative communication with the user, or otherwise need to take context into account during generation. In these cases, the process by which the generator reads and makes sense of its input is often just as interesting as the process by which it produces an output artifact. It is worthwhile to take a closer look at how generators read. Via a case study of two erasure poetry generators, we propose the concept of a generativist reading: a process of reading that produces generative models. Many existing generators have dual input/output or reading/writing processes that are presented as a monolithic unit, but our understanding of both processes and results is enriched when we clearly distinguish between how generators write and how they read.

Gameplay involving player creativity can be both satisfying for players and enticing for designers to pursue, but understanding of how to design deliberately for player creativity remains limited. In this paper, we propose that a class of features previously identified as common elements of "gardening games"---including generativity, limited player control, and "incrementality" or "idleness"---are also particularly conducive to player creativity. By analyzing narrative artifacts created by players as retellings of their play experiences in games that implement these features, we highlight how these features enable players to overcome specific barriers to creativity. Based on this analysis, we then offer concrete suggestions to game designers who want to facilitate player creativity and propose ways that the design patterns discussed here might be extended to further support creative activity by players.

Procedural storytelling offers immense promise for games to offer more reactive narrative experiences that feel more deeply tailored to players' decisions. To date, interactive narrative systems have tended toward either a large emergent possibility space with less focus on narrative structure, or toward greater structure with smaller possibility spaces. In this paper, we introduce Lume, a system for procedural narrative generation that combines the best of these two approaches through a novel combinatorial scene architecture in which storylet scenes are comprised of parameterized node-trees. We detail how the system works and discuss how it moves toward creating reactive interactive narratives that are both dynamic and coherent.

While generative approaches to game design offer great promise, systems can only reliably generate what they can “understand,” which is often represented in a limited, implicit form in hand-crafted evaluation functions or constructive rules. Proceduralist readings, a semiformal approach for interpreting the meaning of a game based on its underlying processes and interactions in conjunction with aesthetic and cultural cues, offer a novel, systematic approach to game understanding. We formalize proceduralist argumentation as a logic program that performs static reasoning over game specifications to derive higher level meanings, as part of Gemini, a bidirectional game analysis and generation system.

Scholars who study games lack many resources and abilities taken for granted by scholars of other forms such as literature. To begin to address this deficiency, this paper presents a basic formalization for different classes of resources associated with game critical practices, and ties those resources to a prototypical system for their reference, generation, and use in game studies arguments. The formalization is focused on three forms of reference: objective reference to game objects, enacted reference to game performances, and internal reference to sub-structures within both. We operationalize our formalization with the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST), a custom suite of tools that manage the reference and creation of game executable data, game performance video recordings, and game executable state from emulated programs. GISST provides tools for ingesting each class of reference and for the easy creation and citation of game play videos and emulated system states. For the last case, GISST allows for embedding citations to running game programs --- in emulation --- inside web browsers, and for their retrieval through URLs from a stable citation database. The goal is to point toward a new class of scholarly support tool for arguments about games and other interactive software that would benefit from the inclusion of audiovisual and executable references.

Many contemporary interactive digital narratives consist of cinematic content that combines performance, sound and dialogue with conventional patterns of player interactions that dictate the story path. The non-linear nature of the content makes applying methods of annotation and analysis currently used in text and film challenging, as any particular experience may differ in significant ways and a player's response may occur at different times in the experience while still applying to a particular event. As a result, most studies approach analyzing player experience using either qualitative methods or quantitative methods alone, and often these studies focus on experimental systems. We developed a coding scheme that captures opportunities and decisions and provides hooks for annotating story content and player affective response. We plan to annotate recorded player traversals of The Wolf Among Us, a choice-based adventure game, incorporating a non-verbal report method, the Sensual Evaluation Instrument [6], guided by a text-based intermediate format that models the game logic. We use David Elson's Story Intention Graph to annotate the story content [2]. The proposed study will be evaluated by whether the responses capture salient story content between different traversals effectively. We describe a proposed baseline method of manually identifying shared story segments and tagging emotional content of scenes.

This paper expands on and refines the theoretical framework of operational logics, which simultaneously addresses how games operate at a procedural level and how games communicate these operations to players. In the years since their introduction, operational logics have been applied in domains ranging from game studies to game generation and game modeling languages. To support these uses and to enable new ones, we resolve some standing ambiguities and provide a catalog of key, fundamental operational logics.

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.

Scott Turner's Minstrel is considered a landmark story-generation system, cited as an important system in our field's history for the quality of its output. Other influential systems such as Meehan's Tale-Spin have inspired modern successors, but although a few systems have followed Minstrel's case-based approach, none of them use its “imaginative recall” technique. This paper details Skald, a publicly-released rational reconstruction of Minstrel that enables exploration of Turner's work and discovery of new implications for future research. A key finding is a brittleness only hinted at in Turner's publications: the story library, story templates, and the recall system must be tailored to one another for Turner's original system to function. We show that this can be ameliorated through a number of techniques, however, from adding differential costs to transformations to removing the least-successful author-level actions. Another key finding is that Turner's original “boredom” system limited leverage of the story library. An alternative and its results are presented here. What emerges from this work is a different picture of the original Minstrel than that currently present in the literature, as well as a new system, Skald, that sets the stage for future research to explore Turner's ideas for story generation.

Scott Turner's 1993 Minstrel system was a high water mark in story generation, harnessing the concept of imaginative recall to generate creative stories. Using case-based reasoning and an author level planning system, Minstrel models human creative processes. However, the algorithmic and representational commitments made in Minstrel were never subject to principled and quantitative analysis. By rationally reconstructing Minstrel, we are able to investigate Turner's computational model of creativity and learn new lessons about his architecture. We find that Minstrel's original performance was tied to a well-groomed case library, but by modifying several components of the algorithm we can create a more general version which can construct stories using a sparser and less structured case library. Through a rational reconstruction of Minstrel, we both learn new architectural and algorithmic lessons about Minstrel’s computational model of creativity as well as make his architecture available to the contemporary research community for further experimentation.

The phenomenal growth of social network games in the last five years has left many game designers, game scholars, and long-time game players wondering how these games so effectively engage their audiences. Without a strong understanding of the sources of appeal of social network games, and how they relate to the appeal of past games and other human activities, it has proven difficult to interpret the phenomenon accurately or build upon its successes. In this paper we propose and employ a particular approach to this challenge, analyzing the motivational game design patterns in the popular 'Ville style of game using the lenses of behavioral economics and behavioral psychology, explaining ways these games engage and retain players. We show how such games employ strategies in central, visible ways that are also present (if perhaps harder to perceive) in games with very different mechanics and audiences. Our conclusions point to lessons for game design, game interpretation, and the design of engaging software of any type.

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.

Natural language understanding (NLU) systems are promising alternatives to traditional menu-based dialogue systems more commonly employed in games, yet they remain widely under-explored and under-studied. In this paper, we present the results from a qualitative study we conducted on different versions of an NLU interface, inspired by previous results showing this interface to maximize player presence and engagement. Specifically we introduced different pacing options to an NLU interface by using prompts and pauses, and studied how these different interface approaches changed player behavior and perception. Our results provide important guidelines on how to design NLU systems for games, but their implications go beyond that: We have found further evidence that careful mediation through interface design, by introducing understandable and player-supporting conventions to interactive experiences, can help designers create user experiences in accordance with their end-goals. Furthermore, our results provide insights into the concept of agency, particularly towards a more complete model that emphasizes the importance of audience expectation and understanding in creating a sense of agency.

This paper describes the creation of the game Endless Web, a 2D platforming game in which the player's 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 player's 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 player's 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.

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player's traits and the social state of the game world.

While game mechanics are a primary focus in game design and game studies, they have been little discussed in the context of introductory game creation and programming environments. But game mechanics are central here as well, with different tools supporting the elements needed for some game mechanics (and genres) but not others. Research suggests many children, especially girls, want to create games based on dynamic relationships, social interactions, and storytelling. But game creation tools aimed at beginners offer no support for game mechanics that would enable such games. This inspires our work on Kodu AI Lab, a set of extensions to Kodu Game Lab, which we are iteratively developing and evaluating with middle school girls. This paper describes our first extensions (attitudes, learning, and fuzzy logic), the principles guiding them (simplicity, understandability, and expressiveness) and the results of our first evaluation. We conclude with our next planned development: extending the "say" command into a game mechanic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dialogue systems are central to role-playing games, adventure games, interactive fictions, and some forms of interactive drama and cinema---but we have little empirical evidence about how, or even whether, the design of dialogue system interfaces shapes gameplay experience. In this paper we present the results of a study directly comparing three different dialogue system interfaces implemented over the complete course of a dramatic, story-focused game. We find that, holding the rest of the game steady, changing the dialogue interface produces significant changes in gameplay experience. Further, these changes shape perceptions of the system well beyond the interface and its operation. The changes are also sometimes resonant with, and sometimes at odds with, conventional wisdom about these interface options in the game design and writing communities. Our study compared three interfaces: a sentence selection interface (which appears to maximize story involvement), an abstract response menu interface (which maximized reasoning about the underlying game structures), and a natural language understanding interface (which maximized a sense of presence and engagement with the overall experience). Our full results provide valuable future guidance for those seeking a dialogue interface that is resonant with their gameplay experience goals.

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.

Bodily interaction with text creates new reading experiences by involving the body of the reader. This has been explored in video installation art, but without immersive 3D. Using a virtual reality environment (the Brown University Cave) we are able to make the bodily experience more direct. In our initial piece, Screen, the reader produces three different textual experiences from the same body of text, two of which differ significantly based on how her body is employed to "play" the piece.