Foreseeing Meaningful Choices

Authors

  • Rogelio Cardona-Rivera North Carolina State University
  • Justus Robertson North Carolina State University
  • Stephen Ware North Carolina State University
  • Brent Harrison North Carolina State University
  • David Roberts North Carolina State University
  • R. Young North Carolina State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v10i1.12716

Keywords:

interactive narrative, choose-your-own-adventure, agency

Abstract

A choice positively contributes to a player's sense of agency when it leads to meaningfully different content. We shed light on what a player may consider meaningfully different by developing a formalism for interactive stories in terms of the change in situational content across choices. We hypothesized that a player will feel a higher sense of agency when making a choice if they foresee the available actions lead to meaningfully different states. We experimentally tested our formalism's ability to characterize choices that elicit a higher sense of agency and present evidence that supports our claim. Study participants (n=88) played a choose-your-own-adventure game and reported a higher sense of agency when faced with choices that differed in situational content over choices that didn't, despite these choices differing in non-situational ways. We contend our findings are a step toward principled approaches to the design of interactive stories that target specific cognitive and affective states.

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Published

2021-06-29

How to Cite

Cardona-Rivera, R., Robertson, J., Ware, S., Harrison, B., Roberts, D., & Young, R. (2021). Foreseeing Meaningful Choices. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, 10(1), 9-15. https://doi.org/10.1609/aiide.v10i1.12716