A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project

Authors

  • Aaron Reed University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Ben Samuel University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Anne Sullivan University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Ricky Grant University of California, Santa Cruz
  • April Grow University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Justin Lazaro University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Jennifer Mahal University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Sri Kurniawan University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Marilyn Walker University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Noah Wardrip-Fruin University of California, Santa Cruz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v7i1.12446

Keywords:

role-playing games, interactive story, exergames, mobile games, inform 7

Abstract

Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player's engagement with an interactive narrative, but branching stories require tremendous amounts of hand-authored content, in amounts that increase exponentially rather than linearly as more choice points are added. Previous approaches to reducing authorial burden for computer RPGs have relied on creating better tools to manage existing unwieldy structures of quests and dialogue trees. We hypothesize that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, requiring specific advancements in two related areas of design and technology research: (1) dynamic story management architecture that represents story events abstractly and allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices, and (2) dynamic dialogue generation to allow a single story event to be revealed differently by different characters and in the context of dynamic relationships between those characters and the player. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytellingsystem designed to test this hypothesis.

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Published

2011-10-09

How to Cite

Reed, A., Samuel, B., Sullivan, A., Grant, R., Grow, A., Lazaro, J., Mahal, J., Kurniawan, S., Walker, M., & Wardrip-Fruin, N. (2011). A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 7(1), 182-188. https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v7i1.12446