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A Framework for Emergent Narrative

Prakash Prasad, prpr@itu.dk Orestis Tsafarakis, orts@itu.dk Sren Emil Andersen, sean@itu.dk 1. august 2011

Abstract

Contents
1 Introduction .............................................................................................................. 4 1.1 The Goal of the game-prototype ............................................................................ 6 2 Theoretical Discussion and Outline .......................................................................... 8 2.1 Orestis Focus ....................................................................................................... 8 2.1.1 Videogames as Language ................................................................................... 8 2.1.2 Videogames and spaces ................................................................................... 13 2.1.3 Videogames and Narrative ............................................................................... 15 2.1.4 The Films Language ........................................................................................ 16 2.1.5 Components of the Film Language .................................................................. 19 2.1.6 Setting ............................................................................................................ 22 2.2 Prakashs Focus .................................................................................................. 24 2.2.1 Emergent Narrative ......................................................................................... 26 2.3 Srens Focus ..................................................................................................... 34 2.3.1 Aarseth ........................................................................................................... 34 2.3.2 Barthes ........................................................................................................... 34 2.3.3 Mateas and Aristotle ........................................................................................ 35 2.3.4 Abbott and Campbell ....................................................................................... 36 3 The Game Design Choices .................................................................................... 38 3.1 Implementing Drama (Srens Focus) ................................................................. 38 3.1.1 Reading the game ............................................................................................ 39 3.1.2 Desirable action .............................................................................................. 40 3.1.3 Rules of the game ............................................................................................ 41 3.1.4 Simulating People ........................................................................................... 44 3.1.5 Brief note on the development process ............................................................. 45 3.1.6 Campbellian symbols in the game .................................................................... 47 3.1.7 Visual Grammar .............................................................................................. 49 3.2 On Visual Feedback (Orestis Focus) ................................................................... 49 3.2.1 Overall Setting ................................................................................................ 50 3.2.2 Game world .................................................................................................... 50 3.2.3 Technical limitations ....................................................................................... 52 3.2.4 Actions ........................................................................................................... 52 3.2.5 Visual Feedback .............................................................................................. 53 3.2.6 Scripted Feedback ........................................................................................... 54 3.2.7 Use of Film language ...................................................................................... 55 3.2.8 Procedurally Generated Feedback .................................................................... 59 4 Method .................................................................................................................... 60

4.1 Instruction and Survey ........................................................................................ 60 4.2 Test Sessions ...................................................................................................... 61 4.3 Recorded Data .................................................................................................... 62 5 Playtests and Evaluation ......................................................................................... 63 5.1 Response to Game Rules ..................................................................................... 63 5.1.1 Information overload ....................................................................................... 63 5.1.2 Poorly calibrated stats ..................................................................................... 64 5.1.3 Lack of feedback from animations ................................................................... 64 5.1.4 (+/-) dialogue .................................................................................................. 65 5.1.5 Constructing a narrative .................................................................................. 65 5.2 Environment and Visual Feedback ...................................................................... 65 5.2.1 Navigation ...................................................................................................... 66 5.2.2 Environment ................................................................................................... 66 5.2.3 Results on the visual feedback ......................................................................... 67 5.2.4 Improvements ................................................................................................. 69 5.3 Evaluation of Implementation ............................................................................. 69 5.3.1 Simulation ...................................................................................................... 70 5.3.2 Interesting Actors ............................................................................................ 72 5.3.3 Environment ................................................................................................... 74 5.3.4 Objectives ....................................................................................................... 75 6 Conclusions ............................................................................................................. 77

For grading purposes, the responsibilities of the paper are divided as follows: Orestis Tsafarakis is responsible for the chapters (incl. subchapters): Orestis Focus (p. 8-24) On Visual Feedback (Orestis Focus) (p. 49-60) Test Sessions (p. 61), and Environment and Visual Feedback' (p. 65-69)

Prakash Prasad is responsible for the chapters (incl. subchapters): Prakashs Focus (24-33) Recorded Data (62) Evaluation of Implementation (69-76)

Sren Emil Andersen is responsible for the chapters (incl. subchapters): Srens Focus (34-37) Implementing Drama (Srens Focus) (38-49) Instruction and Survey (60) Response to Game Rules (63-65)

The chapters Introduction and Conclusions are shared responsibility.

1 Introduction
A series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors which is represented in a particular way. Definition of a story by Mieke Bal (2001) The degree and nature of the interactivity that the game includes, i.e., how the player is able to interact with the game-world and how that game-world reacts to the choices the player makes. Definition of gameplay by Richard Rouse (2001) Stories have been presented in videogames for a long time. Mario (Nintendo Creative Department, 1985) was explained to be on a mission to save the princess; the player is trying to save earth against an alien invasion in Space Invaders (Taito Corporation, 1978). The transition to better graphics saw stories take an even deeper and central role in videogames. Developers could make detailed adventure games with engaging stories such as The Secret of Monkey Island (Lucasfilm Games, 1990) and Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998). Players had to push and prod the objects in the gameworld until the game recognized a pre -determined combination had been successfully achieved to reveal the next story plot. Most computer games provide the player with a vast variety of options during gameplay. They can walk around, interact with objects, shoot guns, and talk to other people in the level, etc.1 However when it comes to the story, the experience is limited to the same outcome (or a predefined finite number at best). Each play session of The Secret of Monkey Island will always reveal the same three pirate objectives to the protagonist, which will always have the same hurdles to overcome. This feature of narrative in games disregards the players control of the protagonists actions; her ability to exert micro influence on the narrative events is not possible. A similar problem arises when most of the current day games use cutscenes to show the narrative progression after a gameplay episode. The players have no control over decision making in those moments. Such problems have raised doubts about the validity of calling games a narrative medium altogether, to rather say that games sometimes include other narrative media to give the perception of a story being there.

Incidentally all of those mechanics are present in some games like Mass Effect 2 (Bioware, 2010)

We address this conflict by discussing key structural differences between games and narrative. While games may not live up to the prophecy (Murray, 1997) 2 during this examination, how can designers keep these differences in mind while designing a game, and still incorporate narrative potentials in it? Well take a look at how games may be designed so that they are personal to the player and do not encroach upon her agency with the game. In the process, we formulate a general approach utilizing guidelines of emergent narrative to tell stories in games. In order to test the level of success achieved, a short game about a favela in Rio de Janeiro was designed using the framework we put forward. The games setting is inspired from the motion picture City of God (Meirelles & Lund, 2002). It is essential for the needs of this thesis to shed some light on the theoretical background the implementation of the game is based on. This paper supports the underlying theoretical background of the game-prototype, clarifying the designers goals and choices, as well as an analysis of the prototype based on additional theory. This introduction will informally describe our motivation and intention with the project and this paper. Following this, we will give an extensive introduction to the theory employed in the design and analysis, followed by a discussion of relevant features in the game prototype, and the reasoning behind the core design decisions. The goal is not only to implement another video game, but to highlight how innovative theories concerning the games design were implemented and what the outcome is. Throughout this paper, we are mainly focusing on the communicative aspect of video games. So, first of all, it is reasonable to review the notion of communication in general. In the beginning, the transmission of electrical signals as a model of communication will be presented and afterwards, its perspective from a semiotic point of view. This perspective will be used to explain the way people communicate and interact with each other, which in turn will be used to point out how people create a dialogue and communicate ideas through design in general. We will then look at videogames, especially level design, from the perspective of film, which is a medium with strong narrative-promoting components of design. It is also interesting to highlight games capabilities to create a dialogue and communicate ideas. This is a particular kind of communication which creates a sort of language that the pl ayers are learning while they are playing the specific video game each time. Games potential as learning tools is widely explored below, accompanied by a brief summary of several scholars opinion regarding video games capabilities as communication tools . The games communication aspect is achieved through its world. So, the world tends to be among the crucial components of the game. The spaces provide visual feedback to the players

Murray famously stated that games can one day grow to become a powerful med ia for narrating epics such as Shakespeares Hamlet.

according to their actions. For that reason, it is a necessity to investigate the importance of spaces in videogames. Below, it is thoroughly examined how the designers can use the spaces to convey their ideas to games and how important the role of visuals in the games is. Apart from worlds and spaces, narrative is another main field which is examined in the frame of game-prototype, in terms of providing cues and options to the players. They choose their actions and formulate a story from it. At the third paragraph, it is presented how narrative affects the design of the game and the designers goal to lead the players to create a story while playing even though no story plot has been already written. Two examples of videogames will be presented as representatives of the current state-of-the-art. These examples are close to what the goal of the game is so a short review will set up the domain and establish the projects position in the videogame industry. Then the paper continues with film. Film, as an older medium of communication than videogames are, has already constructed and established its own literacy with the audience. People are familiar with film languages either because they are aware of directors techniques or because they subconsciously have gotten used to them. At the fourth chapter, it will be presented the way people create stories in their minds watching the images that are shown at the screen and how the filmmakers can manipulate this ability at their will. As a films follow up, film language techniques and patterns will be presented, emphasizing how they get adopted in the game prototype. This is part of the papers attempt to enrich the video games languages using the film language, since videogames come under the same techniques the films use. Of course it could be misleading to assume that all of the films components could be transferred into videogames, especially, if it is taken into consideration that films provide simple story-telling, while videogames expand their functions with interaction as a main focus. Certainly, they are two different media, with certain similarities and differences, but in that point, the scope of our paper is limited to the visuals. Following the presentation of theory, the design process will be revealed, and the design choices will be explained according to the presented theory. The playtests that were performed will be analyzed, and we will evaluate the project leading the whole process to construct some design principles. Finally, conclusions concerning the followed processes and th eir outcome and possible implications will be discussed.

1.1 The Goal of the game-prototype


The game-prototype and its goal have already been described above. A quick review of its goal will be presented with a focus on the visual feedback. The game -prototype tries, to promote narrative by using clues planted in the environment, the relationships of the NPCs

and the choices that the players are offered. The players will decide the way they will act into the game and formulate their own narration of the game in their minds. Each time they play the game, they can choose different actions, and thus they will formulate a different story. Another aim of the game-prototype is to create a channel of the dialogue between the designers and the player, which will be discussed more below. The game will try to provide visual feedback to the players for their actions and influence to the world , and in general the state of the world, so they can decide what their stand should be. To design these visuals so they are identifiable from the players we will apply theory, techniques and patterns that are used in films. Films, as an older medium, have already built and established a visual communication with the viewers a language most viewers can understand. The film language will be used to this attempt to enrich the vide ogame language. That will be analyzed in details further below in this paper.

2 Theoretical Discussion and Outline


We will now introduce some theoretical tools and, through a brief discussion, outline how we will apply them to our game, as well as to analyze the data from the test sessions. This chapter is divided into three main parts, reflecting the focus areas of each team member.

2.1 Orestis Focus

2.1.1 Videogames as Language Videogames have spread widely over the last years and became popular, especially among young people. Many of todays youth spend more time playing in digital worlds rather than watching television, reading, or watching films (Funk, Hagan, & Schimming, 1999; Squire, 2006). Furthermore, the last few years' videogames managed to change the erroneous impression the general public had adopted, considering them as not a worthwhile activity. Nowadays, they are considered not only games or, in general, means of entertainment but as software that can provide much more to the players. Video games are wid ely discussed in academic domains. Conferences are organized to discuss them in terms of academic research. Espen Aarseth has nicely pointed out this transition of publics impression about video games by saying that in the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition (Aarseth, 2004). One of the fields that the academics are investigating, and is related to our research topic about games, is narrative. Many scholars propose that video games can be used as a narrative medium or some even argue whether videogames could be considered as art or not. These provide a small notion of video games role beyond pure entertainment for the players.

2.1.1.1 Communication model Video games are able to build a form of two-way communication with the designers and the players; a communication which starts from the designers who have embedded their intentions and ideas in video games. The players received them by playing the games and they endorse or reject them. The game designers are able nowadays to receive players reaction and by different ways they can propose their new ideas and continue the dialogue. This model will be explained in more detail below, but in order to completely understand it, it is important firstly to review the term of communication in general and from different aspects. How people

achieve to communicate with each other, and how people communicate through ot her mediums and devices. (Shannon & Weaver, 1998) presented their communication model for transmitting electrical signals. An information source that produces a message, then a transmitter produces a signal suitable for transmission over a channel which acts as a medium and transmits the signal to the receiver, and the inverse operation reconstructs the message and provides it to the destination, with noise interfering with the procedure.

2.1.1.2 Communication model from semiotic point of view Umberto Eco uses this model on an example of how an automobile notifies that it runs out of gas and says that according to the principles of information theory, there is an informational process that is in some way considered a communicational process too (Eco, 1976). Following, Eco applies in detail the Shannon and Weaver model into a dam gate notification system, on how the engineer notified in case of danger. Ecos work shows that the depth of this structure is not constricted on the initial description but renders more meanings in other domains too. For example Winfried Nth doesnt constrain that model on the technical aspects but he is going a step further on vocal communication, replacing the source and the destination with two persons as speaker (Nth, 1995). In essence, he talks about dialogue between two persons that they communicate though exchanging verbal messages.

2.1.1.3 Communication through design But dialogue can be considered a much broader notion, and can be accomplished by the use of other means, such as films, games or industrial design, rather than exchanging verbal messages. Redstrm talked about the dialogue and the message in persuasive design in general: there is a certain dialogue going on: the designer proposes certain things through the designed thing, and the user then accepts, refutes, or modifies these in relation to his/her own position. In practice, results of such a dialogue can, for instance, be seen in the often unpredictable discrepancies between intended and actual use. (Redstrm, 2006)

Redstrm talks about dialogue where the designer sends the message though the object on how it is designed to be used. But, then, it is upon the users to accept or deny that message

and create their own way to use it and convey their message on it. That statemen t gives into objects the ability to convey the messages of a dialogue.

2.1.1.4 Communication in Video Games Finally to reach video games, in game studies Alessandro Canossa talks about the communication model in video games. In his model the game designers provide temporal and spatial structures embedded into game to elicit certain actions, the players receive that by playing the game and communicate because they are not just passive receivers of the act of communication since they are required to make sense and interpret events in the game world and meaning is not extracted or discovered, but constructed. The tangible outcome of players interpretation is their behavior in the game (Canossa, 2009). This is the players response and is up to the designers to receive it or not. But this is a prime desire of the designers, to feel the audience response to their game. Nowadays, with the available technology this is a feasible task. Canossa continues further on that and talks about the game metrics as a channel for the designer to, among other things, monitoring players behavior. Clearly this is a way for the designers to receive players response, but it is not the only one. Online reviews and forum discussions are two more sources for the designers to hear the player. These are the channels that now the players are sending their message to the designers who then receive it. A channel for the designers to answer back could be a patch, a downloadable content or a sequel. All this procedure can go on and keep the communication alive. A representative example of the aforementioned kind of communicatio n is the game Assassins Creed (Ubisoft Montreal, 2007). The first game of the series was well received from players and magazines, and made big success, although many critics point out two problems of the game. Firstly, that the gameplay became repetitive after a while by have to perform five small missions each time that the players was assigned with a new assassination target. Secondly, in this game the story take place in two different time periods, in 1191 A.D. and present day. The action takes place in the past time period while in present is mostly cutscenes in order to progress the story. Many players and reviews complai ned that the present time period and the cutscenes are taking a lot of time and delaying the players from playing. In the sequel of the game it is widely accepted by the fans that these two problems do not exist anymore. The gameplay is not repetitive thanks to the variety of the submissions and the freedom that the players have to choose if they want to play it. Also thanks to the plot, the players dont have to be for a long time in the present time period. The designer actually did care for what the audience had rejected in the first game. In an interview considering Assassins Creed II (Ubisoft Montreal, 2009), Patrick Plourde, the lead game designer said that:

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I think we struggled finding the identity of Assassin's Creed in the first game. There, we wanted to push all the boundaries possible. There was some success and some failure. So for the second one, we took what was successful and the changes were clearly needs stated by players. Our development was more focused. We didn't shoot in the dark; we had a little flashlight that would pinpoint what we needed (Plourde, 2009).

Unfortunately in this statement it is not been mention from which channel the designers received that message, but is clear that they did receive it from the players.

2.1.1.5 In-game communication and decoding video games The communication that described above is not the only act of communication that it can take place through video games. An in-game communication is achieved by the feedback that the designers are providing to the players after they perform specific actions. This is an indirect form of communication. In particular, in Canossas example, the game designers provide a time frame (when), a space (where), and actions (what), in the game to the players and they response with their in-game behavior. But in order to respond and keep the communication alive, the players have to be able to understand what the designers are providing them, but this is not an easy task. Players have to fully realize the space of the world that is provided to them and most important the actions they can perform, when and how. They can look what the controllers are on the menu screen, but that dont bear them with the ability to foresee exactly when they have to press the specific buttons to perform the corresponding action or to foresee the impact of their action. Players are receiving designers messages but they have to be able to decode them, so they can understand their affordances of the game and the world. For example, in Assassins Creed II there are six catacombs where the players can locate an Assassins Seal. Navigating inside the catacombs is a rather hard task. The players have to perform difficult combinations of jumps, climbing and parkour. Of course it is easier for players familiar with third person games, but is rather difficult for players which this game is their first third-person video game. So the players have to be familiar themselves with video games, or at least some types of video games, in order to be able to decode designers messages.

2.1.1.6 The Video game Language In order to achieve an in-game communication the players should be able to decode the messages which the designers intend to send them. This decoding is succeeded by what Gee

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meant when he mentioned that when people learn to play video games, they learn a new literacy (Gee, 2003). Learning a new literacy while playing games, means to learn to decode the designers messages and understand video games language, to understand the affordances of the game and the possible actions that they can perform. As soon as the players learn the videogames language, they immediately get familiar with the game and that has a reflection on their way of playing. From then on, they are adapted to the new playground. This notion about a video game language is similar to Nitsches remarks about video games. In particular, he writes that video games can interconnect the choices and weave a net of relations among them, thereby creating a context for each single interaction (Nitshe, 2009). This point of view is quite similar to the video game language and literacy. The net of relationships and the creation of a context for each interaction can be easily pa rallelized with the components of a language. This is the form of literacy that players have to learn in order to engage with videogames. This language is not only the interactions, but is also the visuals of the game. The 3D spaces which are built with colors, shapes, textures, particle effects and sounds are also part of the video games language, the visual part of it. These are tools in the hand of the game designer to communicate with the players, not only by the story but with the visuals of the videogames.

2.1.1.7 The term language Finally, it is essential to clarify that the term language is not used in the scientific terms of linguistics but in a rather wide sense that the word can afford. It is used more as a carrier of meaning, a tool to communicate. It describes the familiarity of the player with videogames. For example, if the player has to press an action button to open a door or he can just push it while he is moving. Players who are not familiar to the language are thinking how they should open a door in the game but the players which are familiar to the language figure out a simple action like that immediately, and they are doing it by instinct. This language is evolving and growing through the years. As it said before the designers, due to the commun ication channel, are getting feedback from the players and they try to improve the way that players are interacting with the game, more user friendly and game driven. In the same way other mediums have built this connection with the audience. For example comics are drawn frames in an order to convey a story. In the conventional comics, the audience is trained to look into the frames in the correct order. But in more innovating comics the non-familiar audience has to spend some time to put in the right order the frames compared to the audience familiar to comics which put the frames into the righ t order as a natural procedure.

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2.1.2 Videogames and spaces

2.1.2.1 Game worlds in todays games With the outburst of technology games have become bigger and bigger. As a result wh ole worlds are designed and built for games, in order to maximize the game experience for the players, immerse them into the game and make them more attached to it. In these games the players can navigate the character that they are controlling and interact with the environment in sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto San Andreas (Rockstar North, 2004), Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar North, 2010), Assassins Creed and much more. Apart from these famous types of games another example could be games like SimCity (Maxis, 1993) and Black & White 2 (Lionhead Studios, 2005). In these games the players are not controlling a character but they have the ability to manipulate, design and built a city the way they desire by using the available resources and bearing in mind the desires of the cities population. From the above examples is getting clear the abilities and the importance of the terms space and world in videogames and how the videogame designers are using the 3D spaces to achieve their goals.

2.1.2.2 Spaces as a component of the videogame language It is not only the commercial games that indicated the importance of spaces. It is also in the scholars discussions that the game spaces have been treated as a vital part of games. Jenkins emphasizes on the importance of spaces by saying game designers dont simply tell stories; they design and sculpt spaces (Jenkins, 2004). The designers may manipulate the spaces in order to maximize the game experience for the players; it is a tool to their hands. The spaces are definitely part of what was called above as video game language. It is a component of it. This argument is reinforced by Julian Kucklich stating that learning how to play a computer game always involves learning how to negotiate game space (Kcklich, 2007). This statement about learning how to play computer games conveys they idea of videogame language that was discussed above. Learning playing videogames it means to learn this language. In the second part of the sentence Kucklich included game spaces as a part of that learning procedure. The players have to learn, through playing, to perceive and understand the spaces into the video games.

2.1.2.3 Perceiving the space But how the players perceive and understand the videogames spaces and the videogames in general. Nitsche is providing an explanation while he is analyzing videogames, with a view

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toward the experience of space, by using the model of Five Planes (Nitshe, 2009). The five main conceptual planes for the analysis of game spaces are: the rule-based space, the mediated space, the fictional space, the play space and the social space. The rule-based space consists of the mathematical rules which it sets, like the physics, the AI, and the game-level architecture. The mediate space is the cinematic presentation of the game taking place in the screen. It is the game world that the designer builds and the players view through the screen and navigate inside with the character that they control. The fictional space is the world that the players imagine as a result of their comprehension of the available images. The play space is the physical space where the player is with the videogame hardware, and finally the social space is defined by the interaction with other player or just audience which is watching. The mediated and the fictional spaces are the two that connected to the scope of this paper. The mediated space is the game world that the designer builds and the players see thought the screen and navigate inside with the character that they control, and the fictional space is players interpretation of the above. This phenomenon can be noticed in films, and will be analyzed later in the paper. By the interpretation they decide their actions in the game. The language or literacy of videogame is what the players use to translate the mediated space into the fictional space. It is the medium, the tool for the players to progress from the one space-plane into the other and immerse themselves into the game and construct narration according to their actions. The more educated to the videogame literacy the player is the easier would be for him to actually emerge narratives through the game.

2.1.2.4 The role of spaces in the game-prototype In the prototype that is attached to this paper, spaces play an important role to the game concept. More specifically, the influence that each space has to NPCs and the results of their actions in the game are investigated. The consequences of the actions are presented to the player in a non-direct way, but using the aesthetics to change the environment. The actions that the NPCs and the players are committing in the game change the visual appearance of the spaces and the world in the end. These changes are part of the overall concept of the project about emerging narrative by visuals and the relationships of the player with the NPCs instead of a predetermined written story. The narrative part will be closely examined below. Similar types of visual change in the environment according to players actions are noticeable on the Black and White games. Changes on the colors, themes, style of the visual and on the creature of the players are happening according to the decisions of the players. They might choose to be a good, merciful god or an evil punisher god, for example. A similar technique will be applied into the game prototype and the application will be presented below.

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2.1.3 Videogames and Narrative Narrative is a controversial issue in videogames studies with the game theorists arguing whether videogames can be considered a narrative medium or not. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing different things ( Aarseth, 2004). Beside that discussion, accepting the narrative aspects of videogames another controversial issue arise, the emergent narrative which described above in detail.

2.1.3.1 The role of narrative in the game-prototype The goal of the game-prototype on the narrative field is to let narrative emerge through the game experience. Provide some story clues which the players will use to formulate their own story. The idea is not to have a pre-written story by the designers, offering some moments and clues which will work as narrative vessels for the players, engage them with the game and lead them to creating their story. Every time the user plays the game a different story occurs according to their actions and their impact on the world. The idea behind this game-prototype is very close to what Jenkins wrote about environmental storytelling and immersive narrative: Environmental story telling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted. They may even embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives(Jenkins, 2004).

The main goal of the game-prototype two create an environment where the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience exist in all four ways and provide visual feedback to the players for the state of the environment by the use of film techniques.

2.1.3.2 Games with similar narrative function Games that are acting in similar way with the game prototype are the well -known game Sims (Maxis, 2000) and Mount and Blade: Warband (TaleWorlds, 2010). Both games could be characterized as simulations. In case of Sims, Jenkins explains emergent narratives are not pre-structured or preprogrammed, taking shape through the gameplay, yet they are not unstructured, chaotic, and frustrating as life itself (Jenkins, 2004). and continues with Will Wrights description of his game that it should be understood as a kind of authoring environment within which players can define their own goals and write their own stories

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(ibid), which is also the goal of the game-prototype. In Wrights description is obvious the importance of the concept about environment, space and world. Similar narrative is applying in Mount and Blade: Warband. In the beginning of the game the players are making their character as they want to. Customizing his appearance, his skills even his background and his goals. The narration is weaved in a similar way, players character is wondering around in the medieval realm of Calradia, meets other characters making friends and enemies, and is up to the players to choose the dramatic direction of their character by being part of a kingdom and battling with other kingdoms or becoming an outlaw or stay neutral and be merciful.

2.1.4 The Films Language

2.1.4.1 The Film medium and language Films are a much older medium that videogames. Though the years, films have populated many discussions, theories have been defined about the narration, the editing, the lighting and for many other components of those. Films are taught in a higher level in universities and people acknowledge them as a form of art. Films have their language (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008) but since are an older medium; the audience is much more used to it. To underline the fact of how familiar the audience is with films nowadays, it will be demonstrated a small analysis of film editing as an example. The reason for bringing films into the equation is because of their broad audience and because of their similarities with videogames renders the film language as the proper instrument to inspire the videogame language.

2.1.4.2 Editing Editing is a useful tool in the hands of the filmmakers and part of film language. Nowadays most of the time editing is obvious and straight forward to the audience. It seems a natural part of film. This feeling of naturalness and the acceptance of editing as a key element of filmmaking has to do with the fact that the audience is familiar with films after so many years of watching them; their audience has been trained to understand how it works, the change of images on the screen. The heritage of films that have been built through years is making easier for the audience to understand the medium. To explain that particularly for editing it will be presented the Kuleshov Effect. During the 20s when films were a new medium trying to find the way to express and communicate with the audience, the Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov made a short film, an experiment, later

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known as the Kuleshov Effect. The film reveals the power of editing. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson explained very well what the film shows and what it meant: Kuleshov conducted informal experiments by assembling shots of separate dramatic elements. The most famous of these experiments involved cutting neutral shots of an actors face with other shots (variously reported as shots of soups, nature scenes, a dead woman, and a baby). The reported result was that the audience immediately assumed that the actors expression changed and that the actor was reacting to things present in the same space as himself. Similarly, Kuleshov cut together shots of actor looking at each other but in Moscow streets miles apart, then meeting and strolling together-and looking at the White House in Washington. Although filmmakers had used such cutting before Kuleshovs work, film scholars call the Kuleshov effect any series of shots that in the absence of an establi shing shot prompts the spectator to infer a spatial whole on the basis of seeing only portions of the space (ibid).

The experiment points out the massive effect of editing, on how people perceive and understand films. At regular films, the audience is forced to connect even irrelevant images according to the way the director pose them and he drives them to make assumptions that serve his purposes for the films plot. Using the editing feature he can direct audiences mind and feelings to the direction he wants allowing him to progress the drama of the film as he desires. Also it can affect the two fields which were discussed before about video games, narration and spaces.

2.1.4.2.1 Narration in Films though editing Editing has an important role in films narrative. It can guide the audience to create the wanted assumptions to connect chunks of the stories and weave them in such a way to create a narration. Bordwell points out these narrative abilities of editing: Editing as the most palpable stage of montage construction, will often violate verisimilitude for the sake of impact. Perhaps most productive is the assumption that the story action is not in the film but in the spectators mind; it becomes a construction which the viewer puts upon a configuration of stimuli (Bordwell, 1985). This explanation of Bordwell about how editing and narration comes close with the project. The construction of narration in the audience mind, by the use of specific images and the way they are showing to the audience, in the case of films and the construction of narration in players mind by the use of cues in the world and the relationships in the game-prototype. It is

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obvious that films and games are sharing similarities on the fact of how their audience perceives the images that are shown to it and construct a story into his mind.

2.1.4.2.2 Spaces in Films though editing Furthermore, the director by the use of editing can create spaces. In the above example Kuleshov creates a fictional space which is constructed by streets of Moscow which are mile s apart from each other in the real world, and in the middle of that fictional space is located the White House, which in the real world is located in Washington, DC. Obviously such a space doesnt exist but only in Kuleshovs films and in the audiences minds. To make that clear Bordwell quotes in his book one of the pioneers of the Soviet cinema, the director Dziga Vertov: I am Kino-eye. I am builder. I have placed you ... in an extraordinary room which did not exist until just now when I also created it. In this room there are twelve walls, shot by me in various parts of the world. In bringing together shots of walls and details, I ve managed to arrange them in an order that is pleasing (ibid).

From these two examples is clear the ability of films to construct spaces. This construction succeeded by the use of editing, one of the components of the film literacy. As was mentioned above, spaces have an important role in games, especially in 3D games and in this project. So it is considered as the next reasonable step to try to use parts of this literacy about films and applying them into games aiming to enrich the video games literacy. Vertovs statement seems similar to Jenkins one that was mentioned above about the game designer being sculptors of spaces. A connection underlines the similarities of the two mediums.

2.1.4.3 Differences between Films and videogames. Having mentioned above the similarities between films and video games, it would be negligent not to point out their main differences. Film is a narrativ e medium in contrast to the video games main feature, namely interactivity. Many scholars argue concerning narrative and interactivity are two opposite and conflict terms which cannot exist on the same time (Juul, 2001). As described above editing is a key element of films but in video games it is difficult to find the equivalent essence. Arguably, game designers use a kind of editing when the action is moved from one space to another, when they decide what should be on the cut scene and what should be played by the players or when they remove from the players the

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ability to control their character or some actions of their characters such as enabling them to use guns inside of a specific room for example. But even the above examples could rarely create the feelings that editing can create and they dont have the capabilities that editing have. Films and video games are two different mediums. Even though they share a lot of similarities they have to be considered as different and the techniques that are succ essful in the one medium do not ensure the same success to the other one. This works aim is to explore exactly that field. It is investigated whether the application of film features for specific purposes may have the same outcome to the video games as well.

2.1.4.4 Communication, Films and Video games Until now, the term communication has been reviewed through different domains, ending up finally at the domain of video games. It has been pointed out how video games could be used as a channel for a two-way communication between the designers and the players. But in order to achieve an in-game communication between the two sides, the players should be able to decode the designers messages; they should be able to decode videogames. This can be achieved if the players are familiar with videogames, if they know the video game language. Part of this language is the visuals and the game spaces. Films shared many similarities with videogames, especially in the visual part and the spaces. The wide audience is more familiar with the film language rather than with the video games language, so it would be reasonable to try applying parts of the film language about the visuals to video games in order to succeed a corresponding result. By doing so, the player can understand what the designers meant easily and as a result it turns the in-game communication between the designers and the players easier.

2.1.5 Components of the Film Language Specific components of the films are used on the game-prototype to provide feedback to the players. A category of film components is the Mise-en-Scene. The term Mise-en-Scene is used to describe the aspects of film that overlap with the art of the theater: setting, lighting, costume, and the behavior of the figures (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008). All these can exist in video games as well. To be more precise, in the game-prototype only costumes cannot be considered as part of the Mise-en-Scene since all the NPCs have only two different types of clothes according to their genre. This is a consequence of the games technical limitations. In case these limitations are overcome, costume feature derived from films could be tested as well. In the game-prototype the behavior of the figures is defined by the actions that are available to the NPCs and are implemented by the simulation. NPCs actions are shown to the

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players not by animations but by signs above every NPC which represent the action that the NPC is committing at the time. Moving to the other elements of Mise-en-Scene, lighting and setting, both of them exist and can play a vital role into a video game, so it can be concluded that these two can be used in the game-prototype to provide feedback to the players for their actions and the simulation. Along with them, colors can also be used for that reason. For the three of them, it will be presented how are been used in films by the directors and how these will be applied in the game-prototype.

2.1.5.1 Lighting Lighting can be used in many and different ways in films, in order to highlight or cover objects on the screen or to create specific feelings to the audience. According to Bordwell and Thompson (ibid) lighting can guide audiences attention to certain objects or action. But even though lighting changes in films during the drama, it is not always noticeable fr om the audience neither understandable how it functions. The audience might not notice how a movie is illuminated but it will receive the outcome of this illumination. Audience attentions will be guided to certain objects and actions, and will create feelings according to the drama. A complete list of lighting is a rather hard task. Bordwell and Thompson (ibid) analyzed and broke into pieces how lighting is been used into films. In this analysis, they clarify the concept of lighting isolating it into four main features, its quality, direction, source and color. They define lighting quality as the relative intensity of the illumination and can be distinguished into two categories, hard lighting which creates clearly defined shadows with sharp edges and soft lighting which creates a diffused illumination. The direction refers to the path of the light from the source to the object to light, and can be distinguished in many different categories which can be applied independently or in combination. These categories are: front light, sidelight, backlight, underlight and top light and their detailed description follows. Frontal light eliminates the shadows and creates a flat looking image. Sidelight (also called crosslight) which for example is used in Touch of Evil (Welles, 1958) to sculpt the characters features. Backlighting can be combined with more frontal sources to create an unobtrusively illuminated contour. Underlighting tends to distort features and often create dramatic horror like in The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973). Top lighting is used to bring out the lit object. For the source of the lighting, they add that fiction films use extra sources and assume that any subject requires two light sources. A key source which is the primary one and provides dominant illumination and casts the stronger shadows, it is directional light, and the fill light

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which is less intense illumination that fills in, softening or eliminating shadows cast by the key light. All the above types of lights can be used on the same time and create light combinations like the three-point light combination used by classical Hollywood which consist from a key light, a fill light and a backlight. In this combination the back light is coming from behind and above the figure, the key light comes diagonally from the front and a fill light from a position near the camera. Of course different variations of the three-point lighting can be used such as the high-key lighting and the low-key illumination. High-key lighting refers to an overall lighting design that uses fill light and backlight to create low contrast between brighter and darker areas, usually the light quality is soft, making shadow areas fairly transparent This is a lighting which is used in classical Hollywood cinema, like Jezebel (Wyler, 1938), in comedies, adventure films and mostly in drama. Low-key lighting creates stronger contrasts and sharper, darker shadows. Often the lighting is hard and fill light is lessened or eliminated altogether. The result is sharp shadows that create extremely light and dark regions in the image. As Bordwell and Thompson (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008) mention, the low-key lighting which has been applied to somber or mysterious scenes, it was used in horror films in 1930s, film noirs of the 40s and 50s and revived in the 1980s by films such as Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983) and continued in the 1990s in films like Se7en (Fincher, 1995) and The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995). About the color, the director can use white light and filter its hue and by that color the onscreen illumination and create a specific atmosphere. Another way to interact him color in terms of lighting is to use a color lighting like in Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (Eisenstein & Filimonova, 1958) where Eisenstein choose to cast a blue light on an actor, in order to suggest the characters terror and uncertainty. Bordwell and Thompson notice that such a shift in stylistic function-using colored light to perform a function usually confined to actingis all the more effective because it is so unexpected (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008). All these lighting techniques have been used by the directors to achieve their purposes. Their application at the game-prototype will be explored later on this paper.

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2.1.6 Setting

2.1.6.1 Objects Setting is another tool that a film director manipulates at his will in order to set the atmosphere of the film, the time period or to create wonderful images. The setting of a film can be totally artificial like in early and historical films or it can be de ducted into the minimum, or even less than minimum like in Dogville (Trier, 2003). The overall design of a setting can shape how the audience understands the story action (Bordwell & Thompson, 2008. This connection of the setting to the story action is rather interesting.

2.1.6.1.1 Props Part of a film setting is the objects that are illustrated into the film. These objects can shape the story action also. An object of the setting that has a function within the ongoing action can be called prop (short for property), a term borrowed from the theatrical mise-en-scene. Bordwell and Thompson (ibid) called props the snowstorm paperweight that shatters at the beginning of Citizen Cane (Welles, 1941), the girls balloon in M (Lang, 1931), the cactus rose in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford, 1962) and Sarah Connors bed turned exercise machine in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron, 1991). It turns clearer from the examples that a prop is an object which its purpose is to assist the plot to move on at a specific point of the movie.

2.1.6.1.2 McGuffin The great film director Alfred Hitchcock used an object in his films; he called McGuffin, which was used as a plot device, a vessel that will let the story to be unfolded. The purpose of McGuffin is to make the plot moving, but the object itself doesnt serve any other purposes, as Hitchcock said in an interview to another great director Francois Truffaut a McGuffin is nothing at all (Gottlieb, 2002). For example in his film North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959) the plot keeps going around a microfilm, and in Quentin Tarantinos Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) is the suitcase. The latter example proves Hitchcock s opinion about the McGuffin since the whole movie is deployed but the audience never sees what is inside since it is not needed in order to progress the plot. In an extended and retrospective sense, looking on Citizen Cane again, the meaning of the protagonist dying word Rosebud acts as a McGuffin because it makes the story goes on, but it is not an object and serves one more purpose, to reveal a part of the protagonist character at the very end of the film.

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Objects, as parts of the setting, besides their role, they serve to make the atmosphere more vivid, they can have a role in the story or assist the plot to progress.

2.1.6.2 Color Color can carry an important role in the movies, even though in most of the cases the audience doesnt notice. In both previous cases that were mention before lighting and setting color came up, but was not explained in details because color can be counted as a component of films on its own and will be analyzed singularly. In most of the movies, different colors render the same range of feelings and capabilities. But that does not mean that a director cannot go against the color stereotypes and use colors in a completely different way than they are conventionally used or even neglecting them. Patti Bellantoni in her book If Its Purple, Someones Gonna Die, she explores big studio films, limited-release indie films, Oscar winners and films at the time were critically dismissed and have been revisited later and describes how six basic colors (Red, Yellow, Blue, Orange, Green and Purple) are used in these films. In each of the six colors, she finds six different characteristics that are clarified into two categories. As she explains in the introduction the six characteristics listed for each color (e.g., Powerful, Lusty, and Defiant Reds) were selected because these emotional associations repeated themselves over and over again (Bellatoni, 2005) in her research. A short review of her results will be presented in order to get an idea of how colors are used in films. Starting from Red color, she labels it as the Caffeinated Color, because it acts as a visual caffeine, which activates the libido and makes the viewer aggressive, anxious or compulsive and split the characteristics into two categories, the Powerful, Lusty, Defiant Reds and the Anxious, Angry and Romantic Reds. More specifically in the Angry Reds one of the movie examples is Romeo+Juliet (Luhrmann, 1996) where she refers to red as the violent color. Yellow is labeled as the Contrary Color. Bellantonis explanation for that label can be sum up as follows: yellow has been render in peoples consciousness as a cautionary while it is also the color that people identify the sun, which it renders as powerful and energetic, exuberance itself. The two main categories of the characteristics are the Innocent, Cautionary and Idyllic Yellows compared to the Exuberant, Obsessive and Daring Yellows. Blue color is labeled as the Detached Color, it is passive and cold color leading the views not to act and thats why Melancholy, Cold and Passive Blues are the three characteristics Bellantoni distinguishes. But on the other hand she refers to the complete opposite use of blue as Powerful, Cerebral and Warm Blues in films like The Shawshank Redemption (Darabont, 1994), Blow-Up (Antonioni, 1966) and Chocolat (Hallstrm, 2000) respectively.

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Orange color in films often represents warmness and romance but also toxic like the orange atmosphere in Blade Runner and napalm sense in Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1983). Orange labeled as the Sweet and Sour Color, sweet because of the Warm, Naive and Romantic Oranges and Sour from the Exotic, Toxic and Natural Oranges. Green color is the Split Personality Color; it might signify health vitality or decay, rottenness and danger. Therefore on the two categories are the Healthy, Ambivalent and Vital Greens and on the other one the Poisonous, Ominous and Corrupt Greens. Finally Purple color is labeled as the Beyond-the-Body Color, as a color that has been often associated as mystical, magical, spiritual and nonphysical. It is also associated with royal, death or transformation. Its characteristics are the Asexual, Illusory and Fantastic Purples and on the other hand the Mystical, Ominous and Ethereal Purples. As it was mention above all these colors meanings in movies have been extracted by notice how the directors have used colors and by grouping the most common uses. This definitely does not mean that a director cannot break the above assumptions and try to render a color with a different meaning that the audience is already used to it.

2.1.6.3 In Summary It has been presented above how certain elements of films are used. These elements are part of the film language that will be applied in the game-prototype in order to incorporate these elements into the video game language, and make easier for the audience which is familiar already with films to understand video games.

2.2 Prakashs Focus


The current point of view regarding narratives in games reflects on the large market success that games with so called epic stories enjoy. In most games, portions of the story are conveyed in terms of very short movies, called cutscenes which are almost always noninteractive. However theres a valid contention about how these cues lose the interactivity of games. For such cases, Juul presents a fitting analogy of gameplay providing moments of lean forward immersion as compared to lean back moments of narrative consumption in non-interactive sections (Juul, 2001). Consider Uncharted 2 (Naughty Dog, 2009) for a moment. The game employs cutscenes to direct the narrative flow (and mission objectives).

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These cutscenes can be viewed on the internet 3 without going through any of the gameplay. It does make a compelling story indeed, but no input is needed from the viewer. Similarly game missions could very well be played without any of the cutscenes to enjoy the gam eplay. The absence of either one from the other does not render them unusable. Hence, such games are independent from their narrative. 4 Another reason why narrative is not influential in immersing the player has to do with the disjoint that she feels with the protagonist. While reading a story (or watching a motion picture) the receiver of the story does not have to relate to the protagonist(s). The experience only involves the recipient to participate as a disembodied viewer. It is our opinion that this disembodiment from the protagonist is not shared by the player of a video game. If the player is unable to understand the protagonist, then that would affect the extent of her gameplay choices. Being the player she is allowed to work within an action space, but not really allowed to influence the outcome. In such a flow of events, games loose one of their key attribute, i.e. gameplay (p.4), and loosely become glorified hypertext adventures. Let us consider an example to illustrate this point - Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010), one of the blockbuster hits of recent years which was largely marketed as a game. But was it really a game? Bogost has explained how the so called game boils down to being an interactive film (Bogost, 2010), where the player fills the role of a film editor selecting where to cut the movie into the next plot twist. However, in this case as in the previous ones, theres nothing wrong with a new genre in entrainment. But this brings an interesting topic to the fore about how various medium available to computer (or computer machines) are so spread out in genre context that a generalized conclusion that all computer media is or is not narrative is largely problematic (Aarseth, 2004). This categorization, can however be helped a little by narrowing down our focus area to not include interactive storytelling and talk exclusively about computer games that are characterized by having gameplay. A common explanation provided in favor of games conveying narrative has been the representational view of narratives. The argument goes that since human beings represent reality through making stories, it helps the player to put a narrative context to her actions. Frasca however points out that games are inherently simulation based (Frasca, 2003). The connection made by Frasca between Simulation and behavior of the entities in a system is quite interesting for our purposes. This means that simulation model of a system, which are designed specifically to generate events will be able to create a narrative simulation that can be probed by the player.

Uncharted 2 - All Cutscenes HD. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eLsYkPhicU RPG games without cutscenes provide a different option in game na rration that is discussed in p.26.

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Frasca even provides the example of such a simulation based narrative model experimented by Boal (ibid.). Boalian drama (Boal, 2000) involves random audience members taking the position of the protagonist in a dramatic position on the stage. In this technique, instead of trying to weave interactivity and narrative, Boal approaches the problem sideways by allowing the user to experience the simulation. This way each player can experience the simulation with their own perspective to realize a narrative that is personal to them. This model holds promise for games where the narrative doesnt have to make sense to a different game player as long as it satisfies the player at that time and only on that play-through.

2.2.1 Emergent Narrative Using the Boalian drama as inspiration (Boal, 2000), we recommend a narrative methodology revolving around the simulation of events in game worlds. Such an approach is nothing new in games. It has been recognized by game theorists such as Sweetser, who points out that there are three kinds of narratives relating to (Sweetser, 2007): Player as receiver These according to Sweetser (ibid.) is the narrative method where the user only acts as the story receiver; she cannot influence the outcome of the story by her actions. Classic point and click adventures and other medium like movies and novels belong to this category. These stories have already been discussed as the status quo in the mainstream game industry (p.4). Player as discoverer Games where players have more freedom in terms of the order that narrative cues are discovered in the form of dialogue with particular actor, cutscene, voice in the sky, etc. This category has games that have branching narratives and players actions have larger effect on the narration, but the overall story still sticks to the same general arc. There have already been some successful game implementations of this paradigm like Fallout 3 (Bethesda Game Studio, 2008), and Heroes of Might and Magic V (Nival Interactive & Freeverse Software, 2006). Player as creator This is the only category of games that Sweetser recognizes as truly emergent in their narrative form (ibid.). These are mostly sandbox games or strategy games where the players have a very large action set that can combine in ways to form a story as well as the fact that players have a more encapsulating view of their creation - such as in SimCity 2000 (Maxis, 1993), Spore (Maxis, 2008) or even StarCraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 1998).

Out of the three paradigms described above, the one that interests us for its wider application in games is the one where players act as discoverers of the narrative. By placing short narrative cues in the environment and actors, we can leave their discovery up to the

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player without affecting her agency with the game. In addition these narrative cues can also be hidden within layers of rules so as to become discoverable only at a certain time in the game or as a result of certain actions by the actors. Using this idea as the basis, we can put forward a definition of emergent narrative as, A sequence of events (complex and unplanned) culminating from the interaction of relatively simple game rules. A common critique of emergent narratives is their storytelling, or rather lack of it. Emergent narratives are not trusted to turn out as page-turners. The narratives felt by the player are no more detailed than a simple retelling of events. These are not epic stories, but what makes them special is the players attachment to them because they went through those events. This kind of story personalization is something central to games. Exclusive story narration is common in other media too. Parents tell bedtime stories to their kids that are not guaranteed to be in anyone elses mind, bards sung songs that only the particular king would hear. But the retelling of events while playing an emergent game like Civilization IV (Firaxis Games, 2005) is always unique. In the following sections we discuss the various design considerations that can help generate a structure that leads to an immersive emergent narrative. We will also discuss some examples of this framework being used to design a game (Carioca) as a case st udy.

2.2.1.1 Simulation A simulation related to the theme should be central to the game. The game mechanics should directly allow players to influence outcome of the story. In the example game Carioca, we simulate various characteristics associated with living in a favela such as drugs, character types, work types etc. (p.38). The Sims (Maxis, 2000) is probably one of the best examples of immersive narrative being created5 from an emergent simulation. The player controls a human like avatar (a Sim) whose needs and wants are simulated by the system in a seemingly realistic fashion. The dependencies for these Sims vary from mundane needs like food, water, sanitation etc. to

An example story about a homeless father and his daughter trying to survive without money. The story is

chronicled on http://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/alice-and-kev/ with many regular followers.

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more complex ones such as partners and career. As Doornsbar explains in his GDC lecture (Doornsbar, 2001), actions for Sims are controlled via a behavior engine which simulates their needs by changing statistical values. For example, an extrovert Sim would feel unhappy if she hasnt talked to someone in a time period. We use a similar approach for simulating the world in Carioca game. The game has characters that are simulated through their needs and wants. For example, each character of type gangster will intimidate his most hated enemy by beating him up or killing him (Appendix, p.7). This helps us in generating violence in the world. This can have effects on many levels, especially if the player is reckless in their relations with the gangsters. It can become a fatal mistake for the protagonist. As it might be expected, the more cogs there are in a simulation, the more care needs to be put into fine-tuning them so the simulation as a whole is perceived optimally by the player. This becomes a momentous task while analyzing the behavior and outcomes of the simulation. In case of the Carioca game, final design of the system (p.41) required simulation of three different bot behaviors: Civilians, Druggies, and Gangsters Each character type has its own logic of prioritizing tasks. This priority order is roughly based on Maslows hierarchical need structure (Maslow, 1943). Even though the structure is very old and contested, we choose the pyramid model so as to simplify the bots behavior testing as well as to make it easy for the player to understand the simulation (Appendix, p.36). Due to the large number of variables influencing the believability of the bot actions, a method to approximate values for these variables had to be found. The solution however was quite simple - use spreadsheets to simulate bot parameters which are influenced by variables such as state/space of actor and time of day. This process achieved a roughly believable bot simulation model that is used in the final version of the test game as depicted in Figure 1. The variable values derived from this process are posted in the appendix.

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Ideal Civilian Behaviour (5 Day)


90 80 70 Parameter Value 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 -10 1 2 3 Time (Days) 4 5 Money Hunger Fatigue

Figure 1: Graph showing the intended behavior of a Civilian type character in Carioca game

2.2.1.2 Interesting Actors The player can do different kinds of actions towards the actors to move narrative state of the game world. For example, in the Carioca game actors carry out common actions comprising of the world simulation such as working, taking drugs, selling drugs, eating, going to nightclub etc. The characters increase their hunger value when they do most of these actions. In turn, this hunger value is connected to their health. When the characters get too hungry, they will try to eat food in one of the food areas in the game level . This kind of autonomous AI behavior helps in keeping the simulation ticking over even if the player is not playing an active role. But just watching the bots do actions to each other is not enough. To immerse the player, some events need to be simulated that create personal tension for the player. An example of such a behavior in the game relates to the AIs MoneyMaking state. Each character type in the game has specific kind of actions in order to make money. When the need arises, certain characters can try to steal money for other characters. In such a scenario, if the player also has equal probability of being mugged as the bots, then that improves the players involvement. In that case the player has to pay even more attention to the actors around him.

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The emergent narrative approach has also been explored in Virtual Environment media (Aylett, 1999). She explains the strategy of generating narrative from actions of the Virtual Teletubbies. A useful lesson from Ayletts experimentations has been the concept of social presence. Aylett uses the environment actors to respond according to the players actions. This concept however needs to be balanced very carefully. Any kind of extreme judgment on the actors part might be misunderstood by the player as an unfavorable game state. This hampers freedom of player actions. On the other hand, limited social presence can make the player feel her actions dont really mean anything and she cannot affect the world. This means the AI actors involved in an emergent narrative have more than one role in game: Agents of Simulation (p.26), Providers of Social Presence Bots help place the influence of player action in terms of social presence (ibid.). In the Carioca game, each character simulates a relationship value with every other character in the level, including the player. This relationship value denotes a friendly relationship when the number is positive whereas a negative number denotes enmity. Making dialogue choices between player and characters dependent on relationship status informs the player about the nature of interaction they will have with the actor.

2.2.1.3 Environment Environments can be used both as an actor in the narrative as well as tools for giving narrative cues to the player. Jenkins mentions this strategy as a Narrative Architecture (Jenkins, 2004) which can be used for special storytelling. Similar to characters, the environment can also communicate players social presence by giving hints about the effect of her actions on the world - what is good, what is bad, and what is in between. In the Carioca game, when actors need to take passive actions like eating, working etc. they need to go to a certain space type which is designed for different action options. By providing an overlap of different choices and different consequences, we leave the style of play to the player. For instance, the action of making money can be executed by working at a legitimate work space, scavenging for scrap at a garbage location or by dealing in drugs at a drug selling street corner. The importance of environment also becomes apparent if we look at Sims (Maxis, 2000). The simulation in Sims is not only limited to the characters, but also the environment. The

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environment also gives perspective to the player. The god-like point of view allows players to see all variables in the environment effecting the simulation as well as the larger potential action space. All events related to the Sim happen in clear view of the player. This advantage is lost when translating the model to a first-person view game. If a narratively important event happens in the level, but its not communicated to the player, then she cant use it to create a narrative (p.8).

2.2.1.4 Objectives In most videogames, moments of narration are used to setup a gameplay objective for the player to aim for. These missions set the small scale target for the play, so that the game can unveil the plot a little more, introducing a new objective. While the structure can ge t rather monotonous and as weve already discussed, forcefully feed the events to the player, what it definitely provides is a sense of purpose for the player. The player always knows the plan (even if hes not the planner). Take Mount & Blade: Warband (TaleWorlds, 2010) for example. The game is a medieval, emergent, role-playing game which is very much an example of emergence as a result of discovery. The game provides several goals that players can decide to set themselves up for. These goals are variable and provide different kind of gameplay choices. Through the games dialogue system, the player can obtain varied roles such as bodyguard, raider, general etc. She doesnt have to do any of them, but she can shape the traits of her avatar via these decis ions. Such options from the beginning of play session are helpful, otherwise the players may not be motivated enough to explore the potential of narration and only exploit the gameplay for immediate returns (clear the current level in Portal, without thinking to look for a way out of being a lab rat). For instance, if Mount & Blade: Warband (ibid.) did not hint at the possibility of eventually becoming the king, then players would aimlessly raid around the kingdom (gameplay) and not progress the narrative. These objectives also need to be designed with careful consideration so as not to have biased meaning of moral choices or financial gain while providing means for the player to achieve her own long term plan. In the game were designing as a case study, t he players have very small objectives like eating food to not lose health, making money to buy food, etc. However, after interacting with the game for a little time, she can find out about the Church she can go to in the level and the option of buying the guy from friendly civilians. Now she is equipped with a long term objective where she can combine the need for money to donating it to the church or buying a gun, depending on what she fancies.

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2.2.1.5 Story Delta As current games go, while theyre structurally limited in being a narrative medium, they do enjoy great success in some cases. Wed like to learn more from a couple of examples. Let us consider the very popular game Portal (Valve Corporation, 2007). The game hit market in 2007 and told the story of a human being stuck in the shoes of a lab rat that is being put through a series of tests by a robot. The audience felt a connection to the protagonist and the story came through very well. On analysis, much of this success has a lot to do with the games concept. Confined test chambers allow the player to accept loss of interactivity experienced through the narrative. Moreover, the story did not have any cutscenes (albeit the game ending). Players would hear the robot talking and conveying bits of info, never r eally a detailed narrative. The player could use this partial information to makeup a story by filling the missing parts Why is she here? Whats her name? Did I voluntarily choose to be tested? As the games designer and writer talk about in their GDC lecture (Swift & Wolpaw, 2008), the games design was especially tailored to improve the narrative immersion by using something called Delta Theory. The hypothesis is that player immersion in the narrative is dependent on distance between story of the gameplay and story of the game. Using the example of Portal, the story of the game is (as described above) - protagonist is stuck as a lab rat, and being run around by a seemingly psychotic robot. The robot kept dangling the proverbial cake to lure you into clearing the puzzles. The gameplay story is reflected as the capacity of the player to solve the puzzles through tools provided, in a seemingly destitute position, and use the same tools in the last part of the game to escape from the robot thats trying to kill you. The two mesh together very nicely. Through repeated and concentrated testing, this disjoint can be avoided from growing to dangerous levels. 6 We also see the same phenomenon in emergent narrative of Sims. Sims succeeds to associate a narrative in the players mind because the events happening (made up emergent story) have a very short delta from the gameplay (satisfying the Sim) and the players affordance (sustaining a human). Since, the players story and her gameplay actions are very close in an emergent narrative the delta is minimized, showing that emergent games almost always conform with Delta Theory (ibid.). In the game example being tested, we apply this same human sustaining model employed in Sims, but modified for living in Rio favela. Player has to interact with actors for secondary

Dangerous levels here represent the case where players lose immersion in the narrative.

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motivations (wealth, gun, menacing character, good relations), but the primary motivation is to sustain herself (low hunger, low fatigue, low money). Applying the same simulation of parameters as the bots should also give the player a better understanding of the AI psyche. We are aiming to provide hints to the player about the harsh living conditions in the favela. But rather than tell her that, we choose the game mechanics that convey this. So the player he rself wipes the sweat off her forehead and says, Jesus! Its hard to earn money.

2.2.1.6 Time As Aylett points out, narratives are different from a simple retelling of events (like in emergent narrative) because of flow of time (Aylett, 1999). Narratives do not list every small thing that happens during the latent periods of the story time. Moreover, the topic of flashbacks as well as other avant-garde narrative models would be almost impossible to convey through an emergent narrative approach. Dramatic narratives would do some kind of optimization to skip these moments from the players experience. This however is not a necessity. In fact, if we consider the definition of story as provided in the beginning of this paper (p.4), nowhere it is mentioned that the events must be prioritized in the discourse 7 in a particular way. An example of a mundane activity that can be skipped over from the experience is sleeping. In the case study, the players Menace is inversely proportional to hi s Fatigue. So if the Fatigue gets too high, the player cannot do any aggressive actions like rob somebody. In such a case, the player can only sleep before doing any aggressive actions successfully. Now this act of sleeping might seem like the perfect time where the game can leave out the boring latent period and jump forward till after sleeping is finished. But, if we take the interactivity of the player during this sleeping time, by our own argument, it will break the agency with the game. Hence, in the game we do not skip any of the actions and the game is played in continuous time.

Discourse is the way that the story is told.

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2.3 Srens Focus


What differentiates any ordinary simulation from an easily-reinterpreted one? It must have something to do with the ease of interpreting the events in the simulation, or rather, the evidence of events and their causes. I propose that it could be done by combining a hypertextual adventure game format with simulation rules governing the game state, which would make for a variable yet narrative experience, where the ongoing change in context would reflexively respond to and influence the players actions.

2.3.1 Aarseth Aarseth argues that story-games are not very interesting from a theoretical standpoint, because they are effectively linear narratives interspersed with obstacles (Aarseth, 2001). He contrasts this form with replayable games which are variable and remain interesting, even in the face of an insurmountable obstacle (since next attempt will be different, and perhaps more lucky). He also stresses that simulation is the cornerstone of the game experience, not narrative. Could it be possible to create a simulation environment that lent itself easily to a narrative interpretation after the fact? An experience-engine that would allow the player to live through interesting times.

2.3.2 Barthes Barthes is relevant to this problem, as his perspective on the death of the author clarifies the need to encourage the player to interpret the symbols he encounters, rather than trying to decode the authorial intention. According to Barthes famous essay, The Death of the Author, the meaning of a text is lost at the point of writing, and the reader creates his/her own meaning upon reading it 8,9. This is not to say that the author does not try to imbue his text with meaning (as, or just haphazardly arranges words, symbols or phrases in a jumble and publishes it. Instead, it means that there is an unavoidable loss of voice in the transfer from authors mind to textual symbols to readers mind. In Barthes perspective, symbols do not

Barthes (1967)

This is not a claim of objective truth, and it clearly contradicts the claims of the Shannon -Weaver model of signal transfer mentioned elsewhere in this paper; it is merely a change of perspective which can highlight other important aspects of the acts of reception or interpretation.

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contain meaning, but rather are very good at provoking the brain to create it. In most cases, there is so much overlap in the authors understanding of the symbols he chooses to use, and the readers interpretation/creation of meaning from them, that it can be treated as a transfer of meaning from one to the other. The barrier that actually exists is important to keep in mind, though, since it allows for some play with meaning. Firstly, a readers interpretation of an ambiguous text will be subjective, and likely relate better to his/her personal experience, getting more meaning out than was put in, so to speak. The author can emphasize this by making his text or parts thereof open, that is, open to multiple, ambiguous readings. Secondly, the new (perceived) contract between author and reader, of interpreting the work freely, rather than trying to discover the authors voice, will make the reader take ownership of the text, and thus of the resulting interpretation, again reinforcing the subjective experi ence. We will relate Barthes concept of the open text to emergence in games as best we can, and arrive at a reasonable theoretical foundation for making claims about the prerequisites for meaningful experience and narrative poiesis in the players mind. We will also discuss theories of Jesper Juul, Espen Aarseth and others, regarding the nature of games and their relationship to fiction.

2.3.3 Mateas and Aristotle Mateas (2000) proposes an integration of Aristotelian drama in interactive media, which takes a similarly phenomenological approach to the nature of the players role as interpreter. He first clarifies the Aristotelian concept of material cause in connection to drama, to be the (phenomenological) reception of the language and action on stage by the au dience which, in turn, creates the inferred formal cause by understanding the meaning of the actions performed by the player, thus creating the narrative itself. To elaborate: the Aristotelian model has a number of constitutive elements: Plot, character, thought, language, patterns and enactment or spectacle. It is understood as a progression from plot (authorial intent, theme), through character (not the players, but their essential character), thought (being the interpretations of events determined by the characters character), language (the outward expression of thought), patterns being the actions and speech of the characters, and spectacle being the scenery, props and expression of the play. The effect on the audience goes in the opposite direction, from viewing the spectacle, to inferring each succeeding step from dramatic necessity, ending with a realization of the plot or theme. Adding interactivity to the mix, Mateas uses Janet Murrays concept of Agency (Murray, 1998), understood as the ability of the player to influence the virtual environment according to his will, and differentiated from Immersion (the projection of presence into the virtual

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world), and Transformation (the effect of pretense on the player himself, experienced in a variety of ways). Agency being the most important factor in interaction, Mateas applies this element to the Aristotelian model of drama, specifically by injecting the player as a character among others, but one who can choose his own actions (equivalent to substituting his character with free will, rather than dramatic determinacy). Taken by itself, an actor with free will would break the ability of the audience to infer what determined an action (if it was inferable, it would not be free) but since the audience is also the player, the effect is now that another causal chain is introduced, parallel to the inference of other actors, the player is aware of his own reasons for acting a certain way. This is constrained, however, by authorial intent, action, from above, and the material resources available to the player. Mateas then states that agency springs from a coherence of dramatic probability and material resources, i.e. an ability to infer the authors intention from exactly the choices you have available to you. We disagree that this is the only source of a feeling of agency valorization of outcome is a term used by Jesper Juul to explain different ways that the player can be motivated for certain choices, which will be explained in more detail later in this chapter. The introduction of player choice means that the causal chain of the drama becomes a branching system, where the dramatic elements must be resilient or interpretable in many situations, from many aspects, alive or conceivable from many sides. The spectacle must take on more of the characteristics of a full-fledged world that can be visited again and again, and explored from many angles, rather than the trompe loeil of a traditional theater play, which is only convincing from a fixed viewpoint and a linear storyline. To allow the player to infer action from the events around him, the symbols he perceives must readily fit into many different possible stories.

2.3.4 Abbott and Campbell For a useful repository of strong symbols which have been used in many permutations and sequences, I have turned to Campbells comprehensive treatment of mythology and folk tales, The Heros Journey, and supplemented it with the theoretical principles in H. Porter Abbotts Introduction to Narrative. Our approach to this has been to strike a balance between what is appropriate for the chosen setting or context, and recognizable tropes, inspired by H Porter Abbots claims of the universality of narrative, which is well expressed in the following quote:

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But even if we dont know the specific story depicted (), we can still be tempted to look for a story. We have many narrative templates in our minds and, knowing this, an artist can activate one or another (Abbott, 2002, p. 8) He claims that humans have an instinctual, very powerful propensity to narrativize what we see, to make up a story explaining the causal chain that came before, which resulted in the present state of the observed object. This is not absolute, however, and can be refused by narrative jamming, where the juxtaposition of symbols prove impossible to infer a story from. This can happen by purposeful arrangement into something comprehensible, or by an accidental representation that simply makes no sense. In our design, we attempt to avoid this jamming by always arranging symbols in the interactive world according to rules, which are perceivable by the player, and should aid in constructing a story something we attempted to verify through testing. The claims about narrative universality made by both Joseph Campbell in his book The Heros Journey, and by H. Porter Abbott in The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, respectively, were used as a guideline in our design of the game world and the tensions we built into the system. We will argue for our choices, and elaborate on the subtler traces of Campbells symbols that are present in the final game.

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3 The Game Design Choices


Here, we will outline the design choices we made, and afterwards analyze the user experiences we recorded in the testing sessions. As stated, our goal was to create a sandbox which would sprout narratives through player interaction. It was our belief that this would occur via the player interpreting sequences of events in the simulation, and learning the language of this particular video game, and use it to create a story, by formulating and enacting a goal or plan.

3.1 Implementing Drama (Srens Focus)


We take the view, based on Mateas model of interactive drama, that the player has a model of the game system in his mind, which gets updated as he or she learns the underlying mechanisms, and this incorporates their idea of the narrative that is going on. We can influence the players mental model through the use of symbols and the overall state of the neighborhood (indicated by the interactions with NPCs), and he can update his model when his actions in the game reveal a previously unknown causal relationship or dramatic necessity. This is at odds with the approach some other games take, where they attempt to implement a theory of drama into the code itself, so that, for instance, music is cued at moments that are judged by the conditions set in the code to be quantifiably exciting. We do not use this approach, because we believe that the implementation of complex social rules into softwa re is very inexact, necessarily unquantifiable, reductionist, and a problem on the same order of difficulty as passing the Turing Test. A weakness in our application of Mateas Neo-Aristotelian dramatic theory is that our model does guarantee the presence of a dramatic curve, climax, closure, or overall pacing in general. This problem can perhaps be helped with a careful weighting of the game, such that accumulation of player agency will correspond to faster pace, more danger, climactic effects, a decisive moment, and a winding down into stability and closure. But since we are dealing with a relatively complex simulation, the emergent effects are hard to control, and our time constraints did not allow for extensive trial and error calibration that would gu arantee a desired (and only hypothetically possible) story arc. A related issue is that there is no guarantee that the most exciting dramatic progression would be causally plausible at all especially not for the genre of tragedy, where the central crisis is often due to a tiny, tragic misunderstanding or coincidence. A second problem that is immediately obvious with our model is that the authorial intent is less dominant in the causal chain we have not attempted to tell one story with the game, nor explore any specific theme. We have applied stereotypes, clichs and pregnant symbolism,

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rather than faithfully representing a favela as it is in real life, we have implemented tendencies and design which is biased for certain events to happen, as well as sign ifiers of past actions which are value-laden (such as colored lighting on blood spattered bricks in the case of violence). This is only to emphasize player actions, however, to prompt him or her to be conscious that actions have consequences: To promote agency.

3.1.1 Reading the game The restraint of thematic intent means that the absence of an aha moment of recreating the coherent theme of the story is more unlikely to happen, since there is no story director to control that the spectacle is arranged in a way that will lend itself easily to interpretation. It is a gamble to think that usage of archetypes & clichs will result in coherent narratives, and it will have to happen without the trust that whatever the player finds has been put there consciously by an author: The player must take on the role of a Barthesian reader, interpreting an open text, with no implied promise from the author that there is any buried treasure. Instead of imposing an explicit authorial theme, we are trying to let the choices aris e from the conditions of the simulation, and have the player respond in a pragmatic manner. We realize this is mixing the rules of reality and fiction, since fiction is often not led by realistic causality, but dramatic necessity however, we find that it is impossible to prescribe a goal for the player to achieve in the virtual world, since the subtleties of human experience is simply too difficult to simulate in code it is a much easier solution to provide an open text, saturated with potent, contextually appropriate symbols, and expect the players mind to do the job of interpretation. We chose to focus on creating a fairly complex set of simulation rules for our game, because it was our belief that the player would be distracted and corralled into a s pecific narrative, if we had followed the popular method of telling a story through cutscenes and a macro-game consisting of quests that had to be completed. We had to strike a balance between, on one hand, easily delineable concepts, which would have to be discernible by the player and combinable into a meaningful sequence, and on the other hand refrain from leading the player along the rails of a story we had planned out for them. The obvious way to do this was to have many choices, which would alter the game state in many different (and discernible) ways. The classic way games with multiple choices have been made is the adventure game in the SCUMM style, such as The Curse of Monkey Island (LucasArts, 1997), with an inventory of objects and phrases that can be chosen by the player, to solve puzzles in the form of dialogue or obstacles. These are usually deterministic, however, and while they sometimes provide the player with different paths to follow, these paths are not co-created with the player, but merely narrated by the game to the player, once a correct action has been performed. This does indeed satisfy the demand of letting the player

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actions decide the story, but it is not open to interpretation or variation, being deterministic. Because of the exponential demand for content, which a multithreaded hypertext demands, it would also be impossible to create more than a handful of variant plotlines on a normal game budget. Alternatively, a more freely variable play experience can be created with a set o f simulation rules, such that the player is acting within a framework which will respond dynamically to input according to mechanisms. If these are known to the player, he or she can formulate a sequence of actions which will lead to a desirable result.

3.1.2 Desirable action This introduces the third element: What is desirable? According to Juul (Half -Real, 2005), there are several methods to create what he calls valorization of outcome: pitting teams of players with opposing interests against each other (e.g. CounterStrike), the framing narrative, the instructions, scoring higher points for certain outcomes implicit threat (e.g. attacking enemies) Since we did not choose to make a multiplayer game, the first method is not pertinent. The rest are included in the game in the following way: The framing narrative is arguably present in the name and setting of the game, Carioca, taking place in a favela neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Certain scenarios already lend themselves well to this setting, while other scenarios are likely excluded, as they would be too discordant with peoples expectations and capacity for sense-making (and therefore not have a valorizing effect). As the title and setting are among the first impressions of the game to a new player, it is likely that their private narratives would be heavily influenced by and integrated with the setting and its archetypes. The instructions given to the player before starting the game were read and/or told to them by Sren during the test sessions, and followed a consistent form 10. They mostly explained the rules of the simulation and the meaning of the symbols, rather than specifying a concrete

We asked each subject if they would prefer to read or hear the instructions . They are included in the appendix as User manual

10

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quest or mission, since this was against our wish for free player interaction with their surroundings. Even so, the rules themselves were tweaked to ensure certain conflicts, which we will describe in further detail below. The balance between allowing the player to roam free and constraining him or her by requiring certain actions to be taken was circumvented by not rewarding or punishing action in any other way than the causal consequences it had according to the simulation. As such, there was no super-game of completing author-assigned quests within the game world, but there were conflicts built in, which lent thems elves to certain courses of action, interpretable as storylines. The scoring of points was included in the game in the form of the values or stats governing the simulation. These were visible to the player in the HUD, and enabled or prevented certain actions and dialog choices. Their complex interaction will be elaborated below this chapter. The Implicit threat method is arguably achieved through implementation of rules to ensure the gangsters will act aggressively on other characters, although their a ttacking the player was not implemented due to time constraints. Since they rely on the interaction of the game rules, we must necessarily return to this argument after we have given a thorough description of the simulation rules, (and after the chapter on the development below). Then we will briefly restate the concept, and argue how the rules influence the perception of threat.

3.1.3 Rules of the game We will now describe the rules which govern the game world. These can be roughly divided in three groups: the rules for character behavior, rules for environmental change, and rules for dialog. The rules for character behavior are dependent on the class of characte r, as shown in the matrix below:

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Actions Eat Sleep Drink Make Money

Gangsters YES YES YES SELL MUG BEAT/ KILL NO DRUGS

Druggies YES YES YES SCAVENGING MUG NO

Civilians YES YES YES WORK IN LEGAL PLACES NO

Intimidate

Buy Drugs

FROM GANGSTERS AND PLAYER

FROM PLAYER

These actions are performed by entering corresponding spaces in the area. The re are six space types related to actions: food homes bars legal workplaces garbage heaps drug corners The food-spaces can be used by all types of NPCs and the player. They affect the stats by lowering hunger and money. Each character is connected to a specific house where he/she can go and sleep to lower his/her fatigue. The player can do this in every house (not realistic, but a workaround due to time constraints). They can drink at the bars which are accessible for all the characters, but which cost money and tires them. The legal workplaces are the main source of income for the civilians, and only usable by them and the player. It causes fatigue and hunger to rise at a higher than normal level, as well as paying a modest amount of money. The

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garbage heaps work the same way, but for druggies, who can scavenge here to make money for drugs. The drug corners were meant to function like workplaces for the gangsters, so they would go here to make money, but in implementation we ended up just having the druggies approach the gangsters when they want to buy drugs anywhere in the world. Apart from these areas, there is also a church, with which only the player can interact, and which will be examined separately. Next, regarding the rules for character behavior, there are the relationship values. Each NPC has an array of values denoting its opinion of other NPCs or the player. These are one way, such that a character can be indifferent to another, while being hated in return (allowing us to portray a gangster who, after mugging a civilian, feels nothing special, but has made his victim hate him furiously). The player has no outgoing relationship data, since our principle of not prescribing value to the player experience would not allow that. Some of the behavior-controlling values also have an effect on each other. There are unique behaviors for each NPC class, controlled by their internal values, which decay over time, and must be replenished. These are drug addiction (for druggies), which decreases health and increases fatigue, if the NPC doesnt buy drugs before the time runs out. The same mechanism works for hunger on all characters, such that they lose health if they do not eat twice daily (only an estimate, due to delays arising from navigating the map after deciding to perform an action. We will go into more detail with the balancing of the values in order to promote certain behaviors later in the paper). The two final values, Fatigue and Menace, are also related, such that the player and NPCs menace value is inversely proportional to their fatigue value, offset by a base menace constant. Fatigue also increases with time, and can be reduced by staying in home spaces and resting. The purpose of Menace is to control who can intimidate whom, during a physical confrontation, and the intention of this relation is to prevent an exhausted character from successfully intimidating another. Our reasoning behind this is that the amount of free time a character has to rest is an indicator of how smoothly their daily habits work, and if their ability to take care of their needs is disrupted, they will not be able to intimidate anyone, and will instead become targets for those who can. Making the strength dependent on stability means that the player, being less bound to deterministic statmaintenance, should be able to use his disruptive capabilities to strengthen and weaken those NPCs he sees fit. The last group of rules governing the simulated game world is dialogue rules. The players main form of interaction with the NPCs is through the dialogue system a standard dialogue tree navigated by selecting between 2-4 options and seeing the NPCs response. NPCs relation to the player is the deciding factor in the dialogue choices that are available to the player when interacting with them. A low relationship value will mean that the NPC will stop conversation with a hostile phrase, while a mediocre score will mean that most options are available, reserving the last options for a high relationship score, signifying that the NPC

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trusts the player to, for instance, consider selling him or her a gun, or buy drugs from the player. Certain interaction choices also have an effect on relationship score, for instance promising help, which will increase the relationship, or choosing to intimidate the NPC, which will immediately lower the relationship score with the player, regardless if the attempt to rob them is successful or not. After successfully mugging the NPC, the player also has the option to beat up [the NPC] anyway, to emphasize our intention for the player to consider his choices as much as possible, and not feel that the game is pointing him at a specific goal. We set the starting conditions of the simulation in such a way that the player would be sure to be threatened by the gangsters. A few of the gangster NPCs were given very negative relationships with the player, as well as a propensity for assaulting random people in the city, making sure to target the ones they liked least. Within a relatively short time, the player would therefore be sure to be attacked by a gangster, and feel the need to protect himself. The relationship changes caused by actions were also made to spread along the strongest outward connections, such that a Civilian who was beat up by a gangster wou ld not only have his own relationship to that gangster reduced by a large amount, but also the scores of his closest friends toward the same gangster (signifying that he told them about the event, so a persons action will result in a sort of reputation building). This would have the effect of a spreading hatred in the favela of a player who behaved with wanton aggression (although not one who confined his violence to an isolated group), indirectly punishing reckless, negative behavior.

3.1.4 Simulating People While we claim that implementing social rules in code is reductionist, of course we have made some reductionist design decisions ourselves. Not only lack of time and resources prevents us from making a perfect simulation, but incomplete knowledge of human psychology as well. We have therefore relied on ambiguity. As Jesper Juul (Juul 2005, p. 170) and Scott McCloud (McCloud 1999) point out, simplification or stylization of a work can increase its perceived expressiveness. It is important to stress that a simulation used in a game context is generally not seeking to perfectly simulate its object, but only simulate it to the extent that it gives the player pleasure or entertainment (or, presumably, any other intended, but limited, effect). Boring, everyday actions are therefore generally omitted, except where they signify something, or aid the feel of the game, such as the myriad little actions one must perform in the game Heavy Rain, to reinforce the connection between player and avatar.

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McCloud says, The cartoon [medium] places itself in the world of concepts (McCloud, 1993, 45). We have used a similar demarcation, between what can be abstracted and explicitly portrayed, and what is inexpressible, either because of complexity or unknowability, and should be left up to the players interpretation: Those things for which we have well -known concepts can be implemented as part of the (quantitative, rigid) structure of the simulation mostly externally observable phenomena such as trade, eating, sleeping etc. The phenomena for which we do not have a clear understanding are harder to express in a simulation (Juul, 2005, 189), but fortunately many of these relate to human, social matters, and our mind is well equipped to interpret and infer things about them. We ha ve blackboxed (Harman, 2009, 33-34) the players mind, and relied on visual, environmental cues, as well as value-laden dialogue, to give the player cues as to the social consequences of his actions, and are expecting his or her consciousness to do the dirty work, similarly to how the game The Sims handles language in the game: just a series of meaningless but English -sounding sounds, which the player can imagine as significant speech. This means that subtle social phenomena will not be expressed in the simulation, though, except where a visual cue prompts the player to act in a way that is not strictly optimal, given the state of the simulation, but satisfies some irrational impulse such as donating money to the church, because the player feels guilty about mugging too many drug addicts. Apart from these lucky instances, the world without integration of subtle, imperfectly modelable mechanisms becomes a very pragmatic place, where the only reason people love or hate you is the amount of physical harm or help you can provide them, and not your charming or abrasive character. But the same argument can be made about a painting it is just paint on canvas; the brain (of author and reader) does most of the work. Our handling of the softer side of social interaction relies more on the absence of distraction than the modeling of mechanisms, which is in accordance with McClouds principle of functional stylization, rather than explicitly showing every detail.

3.1.5 Brief note on the development process Before we elaborate on the rules of the game, we will go through some design choices that resulted in features getting cut from the game.

3.1.5.1 Story director idea We originally intended, just like many other game developers, to have a selection of goals or end states in our game, and branching paths that could be followed. This was supposed to interface with the simulation through a story director program, which would monitor the game state and look for key situations or constellations of actors that matched a predefined

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story bit, which would be presented to the player as either an opportunity (quest) or a prompt, telling him some background description of a new situation in the favela (e.g. because of your deeds, the drug supply has run dry, so the gangsters will start m ugging people more, as it is their only source of income), and an accompanying change in the game state. Furthermore, since the story director already required a parser for events importance, we wanted to have it generate a summary of the play-through, as a sort of list of newspaper headlines. Seeing the insurmountable task before us, we decided that we would not try to implement a parser for importance into code, for the reasons discussed earlier in this paper (time, psychological subtleties, the apparent impossibility of quantifying human interaction). We would instead model the changing relationships of the favela-dwellers according to pragmatic (but simplistic) values, to have an approximation of a living town. This poses a question: Since fictional worlds have no guarantee of working as a stable society if modeled along their own stated (and always incomplete) parameters, will they maintain their usefulness as open texts, relatable and inspiring to a reader, when modeled along rules taken from real life? How different does the world of the fiction work from the real world? How is the plausibility of events skewed? These questions may be nave, but they are pertinent when you are trying to make a rule-bound game world that responds dramatically. 11

3.1.5.2 NPC body clock In order to govern the behavior of the NPCs in the simulation, we considered giving them a body clock, which would control their daily rhythms. To avoid monotonous, zombielike NPCs, we would offset the rhythms by having different needs set to different frequencies, which were not multiples of each other, so they would not align in a repeating pattern. It quickly became obvious that if all the NPCs were self-contained and did not relate to each other, they would only change their behavior through encounters with the player, and this would hardly look like a living neighborhood, just a group of solipsist automatons.

Perhaps these answers can be answered by a comparative analysis of existing fiction and analogous historical events, or even a simulation of a well-defined fictional world (the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire?), to see how events differed from canon, and what variables were crucial to ensure a canonical path of events. But that is a topic for another paper.

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3.1.5.3 Relationship nodes From this conclusion, we went perhaps too far in the opposite direction, and wanted to map out a complete relationship network of the society, with manually assigned starting values for each relationship connection (1 outgoing node per relationship, most of them reciprocal), which would in sum be a nicely crafted system of nuclear families, fragile junkie acquaintances, kids intimidated by gangsters, and feudal loyalty from the gangsters to the kingpin. This was not only a time-consuming task to do manually, it also became clear that the starting conditions would not ensure a functioning simulation unless the rules worked the interactions of poorly designed actors would quickly nullify the stable relationships that had been assigned by hand. Because of this, we decided to auto-generate all the relationships with a script, creating appropriate proportions of civilians, druggies and gangsters, and relationships between them.

3.1.6 Campbellian symbols in the game When we created an environment which would hopefully be conducive to creating narratives, our choices were informed by Joseph Campbells symbology, specifically the symbols used in his description of the World Navel (Campbell, 1949), This is the setting of stories where an order is upset, the worlds harmony is disturbed by an enemy, and the hero must rise to defeat the enemy and restore order and plenty to the land. T hey do not represent a story the player must follow, but a collection of symbols which he can latch onto, following familiar patterns. They are also very useful because they contain universal conflicts and lessons, which are applicable to most game world settings.

3.1.6.1 The dragon The dragon is the guardian of the fountainhead in Campbells mythology, and was supposed to be personified in our game by the criminal kingpin, senhor Tarasca, 12 who lives in the mansion atop the hill (the mansion is the only trace of him in the final game, unfortunately), beyond the highest parts of the favela, which are either desolate or overrun by gangsters and druggies.

Named after the Tarasque, a monster from the story of Saint Martha, after whom the Dona Marta favela is named. The monster/dragon is tamed/charmed by Saint Martha, led into the city among the people, where it is killed by them without putting up a fight. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarasque

12

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3.1.6.2 The tree The world tree is the center of the world, but also the axis of the worldly hierarchy, with the gods at the top and demons at the bottom. In the game we merely placed a tree at the threshold between the nice lower area, dominated by civilians, and the bad upper area. The height of the areas is reversed (high is normally associated with good and right, and low with evil and wrong), because of the setting we chose: the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are situated on hillsides, because all the real estate on the level ground is already taken up by the richer classes. This reversal could work well in a game, though, since a progression up the hill could be accompanied by a narrative progression towards the final battle with the dragon, situated in his mansion, guarding the wellspring of life and order.

3.1.6.3 Magical help The gun is the heros magical help that artifact or clue which is given to the hero by a magical, benevolent stranger, sometimes after assisting them in some minor task, or correctly answering a riddle. In the game, the gun must be bought from a very friendly civilian, so the player must first prove themselves worthy (in ability to get money without making everyone hostile to him). After the player has acquired it, he gets a huge bonus to Menace, and has a much easier time intimidating people, and resilient enough to face the task of stabilizing the city (or any number of other tasks the player might want).

3.1.6.4 The underworld The underworld symbolizes death and potential rebirth and new knowledge. It is where shamans go to discover secrets and be reborn with the ability to fix the problems that are ailing the world. In the game, it is represented by the top left corner of the city, which is darker, grittier and more violent than the rest. If we had had time, we would have liked to give the player the ability to become addicted to drugs, and go through a withd rawal phase while in this area, which would symbolize the death and rebirth (as this motif has been used in several movies Trainspotting comes to mind), and perhaps a new ability for the player to walk unnoticed in a previously well-guarded area, because he had been stigmatized as a harmless junkie.

3.1.6.5 The wasteland The wasteland symbolizes the wasting away of the life and joy of the world if the heros call goes unheeded (Campbell, 1949, 54). Everyday life becomes anti -adventure boredom

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and slow disintegration. This is the starting condition of the favela in the game: A world without a hero. We also encircled the mansion with empty and sparse buildings to symbolize the slow death seeping out from the dragons lair

3.1.6.6 The village The village is the home of the hero, which he is called away from, and where he returns once he has done his deed. It is the people of the village he has to protect, who are suffering under the burden of the world crisis, manifested by the dragon and the demons. In the game this is the nice area of town, the lower and middle parts, which stop at the threshold of the center tree, which is also the starting position at the beginning of the game.

3.1.7 Visual Grammar As a workaround because we did not have time to make animations, we made placeholder pictures, to be displayed when an action occurs. We made the game in UDK, a AAA-level development tool, but our skill level and time are much humbler, so we settled for a somewhat abstracted style, keeping Scott McClouds analysis of the Belgian Ligne Claire style (McCloud, 1994) in mind abstractness of characters can be a positive, as it lessens the feeling of uniqueness experienced by the reader/player, and the object comes to represent the general type, rather than the specific individual

3.2 On Visual Feedback (Orestis Focus)


This section will emphasize on the design decision considering the visual feedback to the players, since this is the goal of the project. But overall design will not be neglected and will be mentioned as well. Taking into consideration the fact that the group consisted only of three persons who worked in this project for less than six months, it can be easily supposable that full implementation with all the features implemented was not feasible and could not be expected. Besides, that is not the uppermost goal of this work. Our intension was to explore how techniques applied in films could be also used in video games. As a consequence, certain features were not implemented and evaluated, although, they are mentioned in this rep ort due to their relevance with the initial goal.

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3.2.1 Overall Setting

3.2.1.1 Inspiration

The inspiration for building the game world derives from favelas in Brazil. Thorough research about favelas in Brazil has been contacted on the web. How favelas are constructe d and how they look like were the main research objects. The main inspiration was the real -life favela of Dona Marta in Rio de Janeiro, which is located in a steep slope, between trees, with the statue of Christo Redentor on the left and the rest of the city on the downhill. In the last few years, walls have been built in some of the Rio de Janeiro slums in order to separate the favelas from the rest of the city; act which received negative criticism from many people. In Dona Marta a wall has been constructed on the left side. It is also common feature in favelas located on hills, the houses on the top to be nicer and as a consequence, they are inhabited by local gang lords. Another element that was examined was the materials that the buildings are constructed from. Many buildings were in a poor state constructed by bricks. There were other types of buildings constructed from concrete and painted bright and colorful. These results of the research became the inspiration to construct the game world. Many design decisions have been decided according to how the real-life favelas look like, as long as they serve the purposes of the game-prototype.

3.2.2 Game world

3.2.2.1 The background The favela in the game world is located in a steep slope like the real-life favela of Dana Marta. On the downhill and on the east side is lying down the rest of the city. The edge of the game world on the south is buildings of the favela and on the east side is a wall that it has been built as a barrier to separate the favela from the outside world, like in real life. On the west side of the game world the navigation is blocked from the favela buildings again and on the background, mountains are visible. Mountains block the north part of the map, in the top of the hill. Part of the background on the left is located the statue of Christ Redentor which acts as a landmark to the game world. On the right side the edge of the favela is a wire fence and behind it on the top of the hill stands alone a nice looking building different from all the others.

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3.2.2.2 Setting Inside the favela

In this section it will be presented the setting inside the favela and only mentions about specific spaces while their role will be explained later in the paper.

3.2.2.3 South part Inside the favela where the players can navigate themselves the south part which is closest to the city is the nice, legal part of the favela. The textures of the buildings are concentrated and painted in bright color or white, the legal working places are located in that area and the houses are inhabited mostly by civilians. There are few drug corners and garbage dumps where the NPCs can earn money by looking into the trashes, and the paths are properly illuminated during the night. On the left is located one of the three districts (the legal district) that are used into the game to provide visual feedback to the players. It will be explained later how these districts function. In the middle of the map there is a square, which is the second district, and separates the south good part of the favela from the not orious north part. The square as the main node of the favela is illustrated similarly to the south -legal part, with colorful concrete textures on the walls. Close to the square is located the church, which was constructed and placed in order to act as a landmark. The ground is illustrated by a soil texture which is the background for the whole game world. In this part of the favela three more textures have been used, a tile texture that exist in the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and is used mostly in the legal district and the square, an asphalt texture which has been used in the wide paths and a grass texture which has been used to decorate the area.

3.2.2.4 North part The north and notorious part is mostly illustrated with brick textures, according to the results of the conducted research. On the ground the soil texture is used again and in some sporadic places, the asphalt and the grass textures. In most of the paths a broken tiled texture is used to signify the difference of the area compared to the legal one. On the left the third district is located, which is the illegal district and on the right are located abandoned houses, a warehouse and on the top a mansion like in real life favelas.

3.2.2.5 Unique Buildings The mansion, the warehouse and the church were supposed to serve dual purposes. They were supposed to act as landmarks for the players, mostly the church and the mansion. The second role of the mansion and the warehouse which was not implemented was intended to

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become part of the narration. It was supposed to be used inside the dialogues as the mansion who runs the favela so the players if they would get enough menace they could go and kill him after he killed some of his best gangster, and become the new kingpin or clean the streets from the drugs. The warehouse was supposed to be the place where the drugs were provided to the gangsters, so the players go there steal drugs after they have killed the guards. This action would make them enemies with the kingpin. These two features were not implemented in the game, only the church was. The role of the church will be explained shortly in the paper.

3.2.3 Technical limitations It should be mentioned that there was a technical limitation considering the ground textures. UDK could not handle many textures in the same terrain and since it was used only one terrain for the game world the additional number of ground textures should be cut down, although the initial thoughts were to use much more ground textures. For example in the whole game world were used only two tile texture even though at least three different tile textures was intended to be used only for the legal district.

3.2.4 Actions The players and the NPCs are able to perform certain set of actions. There are three types of NPCs, the gangsters, the druggies and the civilians. Not all the types can perform all the actions. Furthermore there are actions which can be performed between two characters or between a character and a space. In the following table are illustrated possible combinations.

Actions

Gangsters

Druggies

Civilians

Eat Sleep Drink

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Actions

Gangsters

Druggies

Civilians

Make Money

SELL DRUGS MUG

SCAVENGING MUG

WORK IN LEGAL SPACES

Intimidate

BEAT KILL

Buy Drugs

FROM GANGSTERS AND PLAYER

FROM PLAYER

All the characters eat, sleep and drink. Eating takes place in the food spaces (il lustrated in the game by orange flags) and drinking on the bars (yellow flags). Each NPC is assigned to a home (green flags) where he/she goes to sleep, but the player can use all the homes. The civilians work on the legal spaces (blue flags) and the druggies scavenge in the garbage dumps (light blue flags). All these actions are performed only in corresponding spaces, so they are connected with them. Also each gangster had been assigned to a drug space (purple flags) where he/she would go to sell drugs but that type of space was not implemented and the gangster sell their drugs anywhere in the map. The rest of the actions are not connected to the spaces and they can take place anywhere in the game world between two characters.

3.2.5 Visual Feedback The feedback from the actions was planned to be provided to the players by two different ways, scripted, which provided only in the districts and procedurally, which was planned to provide all over the map. Due to technical limitations only the scripted feedback was implemented but on the paper both will be presented.

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3.2.6 Scripted Feedback

3.2.6.1 Districts The scripted feedback is provided only in the three districts (Appendix, p.51-58) that have been mentioned already. These districts are the legal one in the south west part of the map where the tables and the kitchen look nice, the doors are metal and the windows in good condition. The wall textures are carefully painted concrete and there are tiles on the floor. As it was mentioned before, this district was supposed to have a greater variety of ground textures but due to the fact that UDK could not handle many textures in the same terrain, it was used the same with the next district which is the square. All these visuals points out that this is a nice looking area. It is located in the middle of the map and surrounded by colorful houses which in some of the stucco have been torn off and bricks are visible. The kitchen on the food place looks handmade and some tables are well designed in the previous district while some others are used cable reels. The square as it is in the middle of the map it conveys elements from both the south nice part and the north slum part. The illegal district in the north west part of the map and it is the worst looking since it belongs to the bad part o f the favela. In this district the tables are only old cable reels, the chairs are plastic and the kitchen handmade. The wall textures are mostly bricks and the tile ground texture looks destroyed. The doors and the windows are in poor state.

3.2.6.2 Theme Logic According to what actions take place in each district, states are activated or deactivated and the proper visual theme is applied. The theme will provide the visual feedback to the players of what actions are taking place in the district. Then it is upon the players to decide their actions. The different states were created based on the classification of actions according to their type. Killing, mugging and beating are violent actions that the players should notified be about them. Whenever one of these actions takes place, the violent score increases. If the score passes the violence threshold, the violent state is activated. Similar logic is used for the second state, the drug state. In this case, the drug score is calculated whenever an action of drug dealing occurs or whenever money has been earned by scavenging in the garbage dumps. There are two options for the two states to be deactivated. In the first case, the player should increase the legal score which he gets on a daily basis and in the second cas e, donating to the church, action which deactivates the state immediately. To be more precise, every day at seven oclock in the evening, the time the night lights are switched on, the money a user have gained legally, namely coming from the legal working spaces, such as food spaces and bars, are added to the legal score. The legal score is removed from the violent and drug scores and

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if these two scores are below their thresholds then the states are deactivated. This deactivation only takes place once per day. Alternatively, the players can donate money to the church and they chose to decrease the violence score or the drug score and thus they succeed in deactivating the state they want instantly.

3.2.7 Use of Film language According to what states are activated, the proper themes are applied. To be more accurate, when both states are deactivated then the Default theme is applied on the district, which is the starting theme of the game. When one of the states is activated then the corresponding theme is applied and finally when both are activated then the combo theme is applied. The theme would provide the visual feedback to the players; these themes were created using parts of the film language that was presented before, and trying to apply them into a gameworld. These parts are the lighting, color and props from the setting.

3.2.7.1 Color Color is a factor which can affect the viewer even subconsciously. It has already been presented how different colors are used in movies to communicate feelings. In the same idea colors will be used to interfere with the textures of the district. Walls, doors, windows will change color according to what theme is applied. Color may be also combined with lighting. The outcome of this combination will be explained below.

3.2.7.2 Lighting In films the lighting can guide audience attention to certain objects and actions. For that reason in the game it was used to illuminate the props and space of interest. Therefore in each theme the corresponding props were highlighted by themes lighting. But the application of films lighting techniques into games indicates the differences between the mediums and as a consequence causes certain problems in its application to the later. The difference is the set-scene nature of the films opposed to the explore nature of games. In films the director choses the way he/she will use the camera, what is inside the shoot and what is not. But in the case of games the players are able to navigate and explore the gameworld; As a consequence, there is no control over the camera. Especially in the game-prototype, where the

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camera is first-person view, the player is the one who chooses the cameras movement. So in this case it is left to the designer the choice of adjusting the lighting in specific spots that the players would see because something important was illuminated, like a food space or a prop, for example. The film lighting could be easily mimicked when the players are looking to a wall and part of their view is blocked, but when their view is upon the open -space it is harder to mimic the lighting that as it is used for the movies. To make it clearer an example is used. It is easy to apply the three-point light combination in one specific shoot were the designer controls the camera; he/she knows where to place the three lights (the key light, the fill light and the backlight). But in the game-prototype where the camera is moving this order is disturbed. These would not happen in situations where the players are looking at a specific object or spaces where the players can look them from specific angles. This is why the situations where their view is blocked from a wall behind the object or the space are those which were used the most to apply the lighting. In term of color, like in the example of "Ivan the terrible, Part 2 by Bordwell and Thompson, in the themes except the default, the projected lights will be colored.

3.2.7.3 Props The props in the game-prototype have two functions. The first one is to assist on setting up the atmosphere the designers wanted to communicate with the players. For example, blood stains and bullet shells cause a totally different atmosphere than bicycle toys and teddy bears. Props function do not stop on the atmosphere, they also contribute in the narration. In films, props also have a function within the ongoing action; their goal is to lead the players to start formulating a story with these props. Why and how they got there, who is using them and similar questions would motivate them to fill on the narration gaps in their mind. This is the third way of Jenkins when he stated environmental story telling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least four ways (Jenkins, 2004), which is that they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene (ibid). In this case props as part of the mise-en-scene not only embed narrative information if a neighborhood has bad reputation or not for example, but have a function within the ongoing action since they appear only if special conditions are met.

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3.2.7.4 Themes

Four different themes where implemented, and they applied according to which states are activated.

3.2.7.4.1 Violent Theme The violent theme was designed to communicate to the player the violence of the actions which have activated it. Where violence is a dominant element, aggression and fear are also part of that environment. To communicate these feeling the red color was selected as the color of this theme. An obvious color choice in terms of violence and aggression as it was reviewed earlier at this paper as an aggressive, anxious and violent color. Concerning the night lighting, the Low Key lighting type was chosen. Once more, it seemed an obvious choice because of the use of this type of lighting in film noir and mysterious scenes through the film history. In the game engine this was accomplished using spotlights which were casting the object from high and create hard shadows on the walls behind them. For props were used blood stains, bullet shells on the ground and bullet holes on the walls, as these visuals easily communicate the use of guns and violence. Coincidentally most people are familiar with these, especially the bullet shells, from movies and not the real life.

3.2.7.4.2 Drug Theme The drug theme is activated by drug exchanges or by scavenging the garbage dumps. Drugs are a problem of the society and normally close to drug, signs of decadence are visible. Most of the times drug environments are dirty and scary, so the theme was created in order to communicate the image of decay though a dirty and unhealthy env ironment plus a feeling of scare. To communicate this, blue color was selected for the cold characteristics, the melancholy that a drug society is creating and the passive nature of drug addicts who are trapped in their situation. The textures becoming more blue when the theme is applied and the lights are blue.

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The scary element of the theme was decided to be communicated to the players through the lighting. For that reason the underlighting has been used which, as it was mentioned above, tends to distort features and often create dramatic horror. In the game editor point lights where place where are in the default theme but lower and more blue. Also blue spotlights from underneath the lit objects especially close to walls so the objects shadow would cast on the wall and create a scary feeling. As props for that theme were used of course needles and heroin packs to signify drug and for signifying a dirty and unhealthy environment it has been used opened cans as garbage dumps, graffitis and damages on the wall of the buildings.

3.2.7.4.3 Combo Theme The combo theme is different from the previous two themes. It is applied in the situation when both violence and drug states are activated, so in a sense is a blend of them. For that reason the combo theme does not have each own lighting and props but more of a combination of the two previews themes. In fact the props of both themes appear and as far as the lighting is concerned at some spots is used the low-key lighting with red color and at some other the underlighting with blue color. The selection has been done according to which lighting fits better a specific spot but also keep a balance between the two different types. As it was mentioned, the color of the lights was connected with the type of the lighting it was used. So, red and blue lights were illuminated the district. Considering the color of the texture, it has been selected not to use red or/and blue neither a third one because of the fear that such a choice would confuse the players. It was selected to mak e the texture much darker that it was already, in an attempt to convey both violent and drug themes feeling since a dark color can be associated with them.

3.2.7.5 Default Theme The default theme was designed to be more plain and empty that the others. The reason for that was that in the initial design the default theme was the starting theme and it would exist also a clean theme. The clean theme would be applied if both violent and drug states were deactivated and the legal score has reached the legal threshold . In this case the clean theme would be applied. It would communicate to the player that the favela is not a notorious place anymore but more a nice descent neighborhood. Visually it would make the favela look nicer, with shiny, clean and bright textures, more lights during the night,

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childrens toys and flowers used as props and as theme color could be orange as the sweet color of warmness. The lighting that would be used would be the high-key lighting as the one used in Hollywood classical cinema. Due to the complexity of the system (Appendix, p.49) the clean theme was dropped and the default theme remained as a plain starting theme without the use of props or of a theme color. In case of lighting, the color was white and the type could be paralleled with the high-key lighting.

3.2.8 Procedurally Generated Feedback

In contrast with the scripted feedback which is planted by the designers in specific spots of the district, the procedurally generated feedback would provide everywhere in the gameworld and is generated in response to the actions happening. The actions which occurred among the characters and do not depend on the space - these actions are: killing, mugging, beating and drug exchanging- would leave a trace behind them related to when and where they happened. These traces would act as props on the themes. They would contribute on tuning the atmosphere and would have a function within the ongoing action and help the players to motivate them on filling the narration gaps in their mind and formulate a story. The procedurally generated props would be visually different than the scripted props, for example blood stains could not be used as props which appear in the blood theme and when a beating takes place. Also the procedurally theme could be different for an action according to the theme applied that moment. For example, if a killing happened in a district where the clean theme is applied the prop the action leaves behind is either the chalk outline or the prop would be the dead body. A chalk outline is also a prop which most of the players are familiar with due to films, since most of the players have not experienced one in real life. Eventually the procedurally generated props could not be implemented due to technical limitations. The only one which was implemented is the one referring to the action of killing and the prop is the dead body. This feature was already existed in UDK and as a consequence easy to be implemented.

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4 Method

4.1 Instruction and Survey


When introducing our test subjects to the game, we naturally had to tell them how to interact with the system, but had to also strike a balance between telling them how the world worked, and leaving it open for their interpretation. The amount of background description of the world we gave the test subjects is reflected in the User Manual in the appendix. It also informed the testers that there was no stated in-game goal for them to complete, other than just getting to know the world and impose their will on it. Finally, we explained how the stats, actions and interaction through dialogue worked. It should be noted that our testers were feedback they gave were suggestions for immersed experience, although that was playthrough, we had each tester answer questions: all game developers themselves, so some of the design changes, rather than a recount of their what we asked them to focus on. After the a prepared online survey, with the following

1. Please re-tell your playthrough, noting the most important events you either caused or observed. Did you make an impact? 2. Please list the events you mentioned above (including events you only observed), giving them 1-5 points according to "importance" 3. Did you notice the lighting in the different districts change over the course of your playthrough? Please describe why you think that happened. 4. Why do you think the objects/props (needles, bullets, damage on walls, blood stains etc.) and textures in the environment appeared or disappeared? 5. Did the props help you construct a story? 6. Did you realize that the events in the game and the environmental changes are connected? 7. Did you formulate a 'story' from the actions, relationships, props and events in the game? 8. Did you notice specific NPCs you had a good/bad relationship with? (we don't need names, just y/n, and any relevant description) 9. Did one event lead to another in a way that made sense? Can you narrate your game experience in the form of a story? (y/n/why/why not) All replies are included in the appendix, testers are marked T1 through T11.

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The questions lent themselves to a qualitative description of experience, rather than a statistical comparison, and we were not looking to optimize the amount of affirmative testimonies that players had, in fact, constructed a narrative based on events in the play session. We were examining whether it was possible at all, and if any particular game elements were aiding or disrupting the process.

4.2 Test Sessions


Our objective with the tests was to examine if the environment creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative gameplay and whether film techniques can be used to provide visual feedback of the gameworld or not. The outcome of the first four sessions did not provide any of these data due to a bug, explained below. They can only provide data in general terms for the gameworld, if the players can create a map of the world into their mind so they can easily navigate on it or every time they enter on the same space they think they enter in a complete new space. Following the phases of a complete software design process, an evaluation phase could not be missed. The game-prototype was evaluated by playtests sessions. These sessions provided useful feedback on how the players reacted to the game overall and to the introduced innovations with more interest. The goal is that narration should emerge from the environment so the players can formulate a story, and if the players can understand the visual feedback that will be provided by the use of film techniques. The playtests were conducted in a form of fifteen to twenty minutes of think aloud sessions, during which the players were encouraged to explain what they are doing and whatever they feel and notice about the game. These sessions were recorded to video (apart from the last one which was not because of a malfunction of the equipment) in order to capture every reaction of the players. Then a questionnaire was provided to the playtesters to answer related to their perception and interpretation of the game. Eleven players tried the game in these sessions, in the first three sessions (Tester9, Tester10, Tester11) the visual feedback system could not be activated due to a bug which appeared last minute because of the complexity of the system. The initial bug was fixed but the visual feedback did not work also during the fourth session (Tester8A) because of problems on balancing the variables. The following seven sessions with new playtesters (Tester1-7) took place with the visual feedback system on. Finally, one of the first playtesters (TesterT8A) who tried the game without the visual feedback retried ( TesterT8B) with the system working properly.

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4.3 Recorded Data


Effectiveness of the Carioca game, in terms of narration, was tested through a combination of qualitative and metrics test. The specific questions of importance in analyzing the emergent narrative framework are question numbers 2, 7, and 9 (p.60). The final part of the test comprised of analyzing player action data after the play session. Each testers actions are recorded by the game in a SQLite database system that can be analyzed after the session to see players behavior towards system as well as the systems outlook towards the player. All references to test sessions will use the shorthand representation of testers as T# (such as T3 would mean tester number 3).

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5 Playtests and Evaluation

5.1 Response to Game Rules


Overall, there turned out to be some major limitations and obstacles to immersion and narrative generation in our game. We did see some of the testers interpreting a narrative from events as we hoped, but others expressed indifference, focus on playing the numbers at the expense of immersion, or abandoning the gameplay to go exploring the environment at the cost of interacting with the NPCs.

5.1.1 Information overload Most of the testers replied that the first thing they did was spend some time getting familiar with the way the rules worked, as well as exploring the environment. Some crucial mechanics that we had forgotten to reveal in the introduction had to be introduced while they were playing, such as how to buy a gun. The amount of information that had to be conveyed before the players were comfortable with the world, and felt they could take purposeful action inside it, and even chains of actions, leading to overall plans, was perhaps too much. This could be improved, however, with more obvious feedback to the player when he/she or others are engaging with the rule system. Not many testers noticed that NPCs conducted their own actions, apart from running around or standing in stat-replenishing areas. We had in fact implemented several other actions, such as gangsters mugging civilians, drug trading, and intimidation of civilians, but our lack of art assets and animations was probably a detriment to the players understanding of the world. Due to difficulties with UDK, we had implemented the visual grammar discussed previously in the paper, which turned out to be less than intuitive to some testers. Animations and even voice acting would of course have been preferable, but this is one (of many) parts of the concept we started out with that turned out to be much better suited to a large budget and staff, rather than 3 students. The sessions followed a pattern that can roughly be described like this: Explore the rules and game world, employing both trial and error, u nderstanding introductory information, and typical actions known from other FPS games Exploring the different actions the player has available, and what their results are.

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Assess the world, rules and available actions as a whole, and formulate an overall g oal within the game world, which implies a series of necessary actions (i.e. I want to become a drug lord or I want to save the favela from crime and drugs) Attempt to carry out plan. This is somewhat at odds with many typical sandbox-games, where the player is usually given missions or quests, but there are a few similar examples, such as The Sims, where there is no stated end goal, and the player can take her Sims lives in a positive or negative direction as she sees fit, and be presented with agency-confirming feedback of her actions. Another example is Mount and Blade, which is quite close in structure to our experiment, in that it is a persistent simulation containing NPCs with motivations, relationships, and great or small ability to perform actions that change the game world.

5.1.2 Poorly calibrated stats The fact that our simulation system had values that were not fully adjusted to give the best possible experiential impact was something the players noted in survey responses. They wondered why their supposedly powerful actions, such as donating thousands of reais (the in game currency) to the church, did not result in any obvious change in the environment. In some cases this is simply because of insufficient testing and calibration, which means that there currently is a mismatch between an actions impact in the simulation, and the dramatic necessity communicated by its presentation (presenting what is actually just a dialogue option as e.g. beating somebody up creates the expectation of dramatic cons equences, and correspondingly a disappointment and loss of feeling of agency if the expectation is let down by a perceived lack of change in the simulation).

5.1.3 Lack of feedback from animations Many respondents complained that they did not see much evidence of the supposedly complex system, and attributed it to poor interface design, as well as the short period of the play sessions: An interface cannot be so intuitive as to be instantly understood. It must necessarily use non-iconic symbols which has no actual resemblance to the things they signify, but must be associated with the signified by informing the user directly of the relationship, or by repetition until the connection between interface and game element is perceived

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5.1.4 (+/-) dialogue Writing the dialogue was an exercise in restraint, because text is cheap, so it would have been easy to write long dialogue trees with florid descriptions of the world, and exposition about the characters in the favela. Since our art was so sparse, though, with only 2 charac ter models (male and female) representing villains and good guys, rich and poor, there were already so many obstacles to suspension of disbelief, that introducing cognitive dissonance between descriptive dialogue and simplistic world would not have been helpful at all. Even so, where it was possible, we wrote dialogue that corresponded with the feel of the world and people, while being purposely vague about anything (including the player) that could not directly experienced by the player while playing the game.

5.1.5 Constructing a narrative This did not occur as much as we would have liked, or at least was not expressed clearly enough for us to note, in most cases. T1 did make clear interpretive comments about his experience and plans, such as its like a rich guy [that] you get to kill in the end upon seeing the mansion atop the hill, and T10: Im the friendliest robber in the world, kind of like Robin Hood of the favela. Some testers focused a lot on the environment, noticing the change of decoration; others ignored that completely, and focused on managing stats (such as money mugging was very popular), while others again spent time on cultivating good or bad relationships with the people of the favela, and going through the dialogue options.

5.2 Environment and Visual Feedback


Starting the game the players needed some time to understand the Heads -Up Display (HUD). On the right they were able to see their stats (health, hunger, fatigue, menace, if they are armed or not and what actions they executed) and on the left the stats of the NPC they pointed at, plus if that NPC was a civilian, gangster or druggie and their relationship with the NPC. Most of the players spent some time to understand the HUD and the stats system, how the bars are connected with each other and with spaces. Most players after consumed some time on that procedure they were trying to improve their stats, by resting, eating or working. The rest of them start talking to the NPCs and they were trying to interact with them.

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5.2.1 Navigation In terms of navigation, the players faced difficulties to recognize where they are in the level and register it in their mind. Most of them found themselves wandering around without being able to associate with their previous visits in each area. Especially a few players continue having these problems until the end of the playtest, failing to navigate themselves naturally. The navigation problems arose due to three reasons. Firstly, because the map was designed taking into consideration that a mini-map will exist in the interface to point out the places of interest and assist the players to navigate. The mini-map was not finally implemented eventually because other features with higher priority had to be implemented. The absence of a mini-map forced the players to construct a map in their mind on their own, thus it created one more task for the players to deal with. The second reason was that the favela was designed to have fifty to seventy inhabitants but due to technical limitations, the favela was populated by thirty NPCs. Maps size scaled down but as the playtests reveal it was not sufficient enough. The ultimate reason is related to the warehouse and the mansion as features which were not finally implemented in the game. That fact affected the flow balance of the map. Namely, the west side had points of interest (the three districts) while the east side had only the church. Therefore when the players navigated on the east side they didnt have many options for actions. For better results, in terms of navigation, the map should be even smaller and the district distributed all over the map and not in one side with the church on the center acts as a landmark.

5.2.2 Environment

One of the goals of the game-prototype was to let narrative emerge by the gameworld. As it was reviewed before, Jenkins states that Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted. They may even embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives (Jenkins, 2004).

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The game-prototype succeeded in creating all four ways and let narrative emerge. This conclusion can be drawn examining the replies of some testers. T2 mentioned that he adapted his playing style to the environment of the favela (first Jenkins way), and T4 that maybe there was a drug war going on (2nd Jenkins way). But it gets more powerful in the case of T1, who saw the mansion, he tried to go there but the path was blocked by a fence. When he left he said I was interested in it, it could be a rich guy that you get to kill in the end, or you get to usurp (Appendix, p.86, i., 15:13). As it was said before mansions purpose was what T1 assumed, but eventually it was not implemented and there was no reference about it, neither about the mansion and the kingpin in the dialogues or anywhere in the game. But T1 by only seeing the mansion, he created the proper assumption for it. In case of T1 all four Jenkins ways were recognized.

5.2.3 Results on the visual feedback

5.2.3.1 Props All of the testers acknowledge that the props helped to set up the atmosphere of the environment and make it look more dangerous, especially the blood stains. Half of the testers notice that the props appear and disappear and three of them filled in the survey that they realized that the events occurring at the game are connected to the changes on the environment. Another tester replied that it was hard to connect them and he would guess that they are. The other half of the testers thought that it was a fixed part of the decoration. Only one of them (T4) later was able to realize that the props appeared and disappeared since he remember that after robbing an NPC he saw a pack of drugs appearing on the ground. The reason that they didnt notice the absence of the props in the beginning of the session is related to the fact that they were concentrated on recognizing how their statistics work and how they can improve them or interacting with the NPCs, in both cases without paying attention on the environment. When they start looking to the environment most of the props were already there. It was mentioned above the narrative role of the props. Four testers clearly replied to the survey that the props helped them to construct a story and they eventually were able to formulate a story. In these cases the in-game props achieved to have a similar role as they have in films and manage to emerge narrative for half of the testers and give feedback to four testers for the state of the favela.

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In these cases the in-game props achieve to have a similar role as they have in films and manage to emerge narrative for half of the testers and give feedback to four testers for the state of the favela.

5.2.3.2 Lighting Answering the question Did you notice the lighting in the different districts change over the course of your playthrough? Please describe why you think that happened only three out of eight testers mentioned anything more about the lighting apart the day/night cycle. T4 said that the impression is that it is darker in the bad neighborhood, but did not mention anything about the change on the lighting and the other two did not clearly notice them. T1 said that looking back on it now I think there were some lighting changes, but they were too subtle for me to notice which shows that he could not completely understand the lighting changes but seems to have a subconscious effect. T6 replied that, Yes, to implicitly signify time of day to the player, possibly to also hint as to what types of people are around and therefore what activities are possible. T6 went one step further and conjectured the concept of how the lighting was set up. At a first glance the lighting seems to fail, the change was not noticeable and understandable. Remembering how lighting functions in films, it is not noticeable or understandable from most of the audience neither, but it guide audiences attention to certain objects or action and audiences feelings to the drama of the film. It has a function in a second subconscious layer. Looking the playtest results from this point of view, two playtesters managed to notice this function of lighting one of them almost understand it. Taking that into consideration, it seems that the lighting had a fairly good degree of success.

5.2.3.3 Color As it was reviewed in the theory section, color has more of a subconscious function. Even though the players do not consciously notice the change of color, the change may still have an effect on them. Color has an effect on shaping the feelings of the viewer subconsciously. In those terms is difficult to evaluate that from a play session and answering a survey but looking into testers reactions on the environment it seems that the color changes o n lighting and textures helped towards the desirable direction.

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5.2.4 Improvements Analyzing the playtests helped to point out changes that would make the game-prototype even more successful. The districts should be equally distributed in the level with the chur ch in the center. The paths that connected the districts should be smaller, narrower and with less significant space, so the players would not spend much time outside the district especially since the procedurally generated feedback was not implemented. The districts themselves should be smaller since they would be populated by fewer NPCs as it was originally planned. Inside smaller districts the props would be more visible and the lighting and the changes in color of the texture more powerful. One more way to amplify the role of the visual feedback would be to overcome the set-scene opposed to explore difference of the two mediums by the use fixed cameras similar to games Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998) or Silent Hill (Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, 1999). In this case the designer would manipulate more the props and the lighting. Finally, the default theme which is used should be replaced by the clean theme of the initial idea. The clean theme should have props like children toys and flowers. In that case the players would have noticed the absence of the props after the theme change. Based on the contrast among the clean theme and the others, the playtesters would be in position to distinguish the change in the theme and its purpose.

5.3 Evaluation of Implementation


After the test sessions, when players were asked to recount the story of their play session, many of them created short stories such as (Appendix, p.87-106): T10 I came, I saw, and I robbed people T1 My playthrough involved being as aggressive and violent as possible I also beat as many people as I could, I was hoping this would make people "fear" me more. T3 I decided I don't have any qualms about mugging gangsters. I took their money and donated it to the church to fight crime, converting gangsters to civilians. T4 . Later, I talked to a woman who also seemed very friendly. We talked colloquially, and joked about me possibly being a gangster. She thought the drugs were to (sic.) expensive.. T6 . After earning money by working in a factory, I realized that mugging people was a much faster way to make cash. I then learnt which building was the church and began to convert the gangsters into civs with a selfish aim of being the only seller on in the favela. I converted about 7 gansters (sic.) into civs by the fourth morning. T8B I tried to be a nice citizen trying to avoid selling drugs but being kind of a Brazilian Robin Hood. Thus, I bought a gun and started to get money from the

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gangsters, killing them, and expending the money in the church to convert drug addicts into citizens. The lack of a longer overarching story was observed, which is understandable due to the limited content for the test case. When the players got to the part where there were no more actions to explore, they became bored with the limited gameplay, and lost interest in linking their actions together as a story. For understanding the particular shortcomings of the system, in the following sections we will analyze the test sessions with a particular eye towards our framework.

5.3.1 Simulation If we compare the bot behavior between two different play sessions, the same bot actors have sufficiently high difference in stat values. This difference can be seen while comparing the variable values of Hunger and Money for bot number 65, as shown in Figure 2 & Figure 3. This tells us that characters behaved very well as per our requirements to generate an emergent system that can balance itself while interacting with the player.
160 140 120 100 Money Value 80 60 40 20 0 -20 -40 Time T2 - Money T3 - Money T7 - Money

Figure 2: Graph showing Money values for Bot65 in Tests T2, T3, T7

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200 150 100 Hunger Value 50 0 -50 -100 -150 Time T2 - Hunger T3 - Hunger T7 - Hunger

Figure 3: Graph showing Hunger values for Bot65 in Tests T2, T3, T7

Average Importance 3 2,5 2 1,5 1 0,5 0

Asking the players about the importance of different actions (Question 3, p.60) From the play testing sample informed us of a general trend. As expected in any simulation, the players rate important actions for their advantage, and

neglect a few. The problem however was that much more actions comprise of these extremes than expected. Its our opinion that the players perception is limited by a literal lack of options they have, as well as being a reflection of unbalance in the system. Some actions like scavenging just did not make sense for the players to do because of the presence of better options like mugging.
Figure 4: Average Rating of importance given to different actions in the game

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5.3.2 Interesting Actors While we want to make distinct characters for the game, the process was never really possible for the small sized team of three to accomplish on time. Hence, we tried to create an illusion of interesting actors by using a class structure and personal stats. All interactions of the player with the bots were administered by logic of the class they belonged to, such as the gangsters would talk about beating you up, while the druggies would always ask for free drugs. However, this strategy did not turn out to be effective enough as most players could not relate to the bots. As T6 noted in his questionnaire (Appendix, p.98), they all looked rather generic. An increase in immersion can be predicted by increasing the depth in behavior of characters in the game, via better character models and dialogues. In terms of the characters presenting social presence of the player, we can analyze the before and after values representing relationship of bots towards the player. This absolute change in the relation values is grouped by each class in Figure 5. The advantage of looking at absolute values is that it helps us to only look at the degree of interaction and not worry about the kind of interaction. As is evident from Figure 5, the relationship system lacks balance. While some of the players (such as T1, T2, T3 and T10) interacted a lot with Civilian type characters, most of the other players mostly interacted with the Gangsters 13. This was not the intention. Another anomaly is the extremely low level of interactions with the Druggies. Some players showed the interest in interacting with Druggie, but werent able to - T8A wanted to going to try to sell drugs to the drug addicts (Appendix, p.86, viii, 10:07).

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We analyze the reasons behind larger gangster interactions later (p. 77)

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0,8 0,7 Average relationship Change 0,6 0,5 0,4 0,3 0,2 0,1 0 T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8A T8B T9 T10 T11 Test Subjects Relationship Change per Civilian Relationship Change per Gangster Relationship Change per Druggie

Figure 5: Average relationship change (Absolute) on bot classes during test interaction

Moreover, if we take a look at the net change to analyze the direction of relationship change as shown in Figure 6, players regard for their relationship can be called nominal at best. Majority of the players show a positive trend in their relationship with the world. But the number that ignores keeping good relationships is too large. Deterioration in relations with the actors was given no regard, except only in certain cases where the testers would voluntarily ask how they can improve their relations with the bots - T10: so, how do I make them trust me? (Appendix, p.86, xi, 7:15). We also see extremely low levels of interaction with druggies. This can be because players simply dont like druggies, but the universal nature of this trend signifies that the Druggie class was not performing as expected during these test sessions due to some implementation bug. We would like to balance the system so that the player can see clear effects of these deteriorating relations. One way that this behavior can be modified is by having bots behaving badly towards the player when their relationship is bad, rather than just dialogues being disrespectful.

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0,7 Average relationship Change 0,5 0,3 0,1 -0,1 -0,3 -0,5 T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 T6 T7 T8A T8B T9 T10 T11

Test Subjects Relationship Change per Civilian Relationship Change per Gangster Relationship Change per Druggie

Figure 6: Average relationship change (net) on bot classes during test interaction

5.3.3 Environment Since we paid special attention to the environment in this project, individual considerations that can affect environments influence on the emergent narrative have been discussed earlier (p.65). However, we would like to show how the players responded to the environment through a simple metrics test. The level design used for the game had segregated the playing area into three districts that present different inhabitants as well as scenery. These districts afforded different kind of narrative potentials. For example, if the player was seen predominantly in the uphill areas, then he has a higher chance of being involved in a violent situation as compared to the district down the hill. Many players commented that they found it more fun and felt it was important to mug people. This attitude is confirmed if we look at the data showing players location on the map during the play session in Figure 7. They are more concentrated toward the areas uphill where the rich actors congregate more (at the entertainment spaces), as compared to downhill districts.

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T1 Beating actions

T2 Beating actions

T5 Beating actions Figure 7: Beating up actions for players T1, T2, T5, T7

T7 Beating actions

5.3.4 Objectives The current version of the game really doesnt have any objectives. The game is more of a sandbox system where the players are creators of emergent narrative for the most part rather than discoverers as explained on p.26. We noticed that players were happy in formulating narratives in the short term as well as coming up with long-term goals while playing the goal. For example, while looking up the hill, T1 commented about becoming powerful enough to go to the mansion at the top and usurp the boss and take over the role of leader ( Appendix, p.86,

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i., 15:13). But we would have liked more players to come up with such objectives. The games limited content could only afford activities worth about 2 days play in game time and then the players would lose focus. This problem can be helped by having more content and larger map space. But a more efficient way would be for the system to generate such objectives such as the players friend ly actors can ask the player to save them from mugging or beating. The key however would be to make such objectives be voluntary, giving freedom to the player to pick and choose.

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6 Conclusions
The design of the game ended up having many interrelated rules working underneath a somewhat opaque interface. Some of this is the fault of an over-ambitious concept and choice of platform, which would need much more time and resources to be realized, and a lack of focus on conveying information to the player. The use of subtle folk symbols and a Campbellinspired relation between world elements fit nicely into the favela setting, but didnt elicit as clear a player interpretation as we would have wanted. The very varied responses we got suggest that we would need a stricter method for testing if we want to have more focused data. For now we got a qualitative examination of the possibilities of the system, despite its flaws, and even a few rather positive results. The flaws and complexity of the game conspire to make it difficult to get focused results from it, and our unwillingness to introduce scripts that would force certain events, makes testing specific elements problematic. The combination of a simulation and a dialogue system worked reasonably well, although better communication about how to influence the game state would probably increase agency. A larger and better selection of dialogue options would also make the difference from a mere hypertext more obvious, and lead to more player engagement with the simulation , to steer dialogue options in a desired direction. The environment of game-prototype succeeded in creating the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in all four Jenkins ways, and the props succeeded to let narrative emerge for half of the playtesters. The lighting had a fairly good success in a second layer, and the color changes were indicated to assist in setting the desirable atmosphere. Despite the differences between films and video games, components of the film language can be used to enrich the video game language, but it should be taken into consideration how the specific components act differently in the two media. While the implementation shows many shortcomings, the biggest reason for those seems to be a small set of player options and overall content. Lack of actions that the bots could do to the player failed to keep player in check, and allowed rampant abuse and disregard for the actors. In addition, the lack of deep actions hampered the players ability to piece together a longer story. However, most of the framework specific designs made an impact on how players interacted with the system and how they formulated a sequence of events that expressed their story. Further development iterations along the lines of the framework can help the game take

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more concrete shape and purpose. In addition, further research into the following topics can help in creating a more robust emergent narrative framework: Testing simulations The definition of emergence through simulation involves a dangerous pitfall for game design - how to design for unexpected events? This happened in our case study as well, we constantly kept finding new neat (and sometimes annoying) side effects that arose from interaction of simulation rules. For example during final testing players found a loophole in the game where, because of the partying nature of gangsters, they could catch them with low Menace most of the time and stack up on money. Such simulation trends need to be recognized while designing, so that an emergent strategy does not break the immersion in the story. Finding out a better methodology for testing the simulation in this case study would improve its effectiveness as well as streamline development. Procedural generation of objectives in simulated environments An interesting experiment would be to see if the introduction of an objective generation system can improve the experience. As discussed (p.31), emergent narrative games use such systems to challenge the player. Introducing a system that can decipher the simulation state players are in and deliver custom objectives to them could introduce more dramatic events in the players narrative. Post-Game Narrative Since emergent narrative constitutes of actions of the player, it might also be a good idea to support this story creation mechanism through the game. Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008) has several missions for the player. The player can take up the mission she wishes, complete it, gather up the reward, and proceed with the game. There is a story that players experience, but it disappears after the event as most games forget about them. Fallout: New Vegas (Bethesda, 2010) takes the same model and improves on it wherein certain actors met after such missions will mention your performance. Even to the extent that your actions have led to a change in the game world. This improves the attention that players pay to their own actions, in turn helping their immersion in the story. Sweetser lists few methods that can aid players i n this process like event Journals of the protagonist (Sweetser, 2010). For the Carioca game, one of the earlier ideas was to have the players actions and world events being communicated to the player via a friendly gossip system. Such a system was to comprise of friendly bots that could convey pieces of information deemed important to the player as well as relay back how important her actions have been on the world. For example, during conversation with a friendly character, actor would inform player about the gangster that was killed (by player), and how it has led to a gang war.

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