Dramaturgical Design of the Narrative in Digital Games: AI planning of conflicts in non-linear spaces of time

Abstract

Dramaturgy is the design of emotional experience. For digital games that are intended to tell a story, game design includes the anticipation of the players' experiences which shall lead to excitement, fascination, thrill, perhaps to immersion and flow, but not to boredom or confusion. What players will experience takes place over time. Events that happen are linearly ordered and those that may potentially happen form a partially orderded space-the game's story space. Dramaturgical game design is the anticipation of varying experiences and their thoughtful arrangment in a partially ordered space of events which players may possibly experience when playing the game. This may be seen as planning as demonstrated in an original game design case study. The approach particularly applies to those digital games that bear the potentials of telling a story. The inductive approach to AI planning is introduced into dramaturgical design.