DRAMA MANAGEMENT AND PLAYER MODELING FOR INTERACTIVE FICTION GAMES

TLDR

Drama management components are increasingly used in story‑based games to guide narratives toward arcs that enhance player experience. The study evaluates a novel drama management approach in the interactive fiction game Anchorhead. The approach personalizes interaction using player feedback and is evaluated with real players in a live game implementation. Adding the Case‑based Drama Manager improves player guidance and overall experience, yielding insights achievable only through real‑player evaluation.

Abstract

A growing research community is working toward employing drama management components in story‐based games. These components gently guide the story toward a narrative arc that improves the player's gaming experience. In this article we evaluate a novel drama management approach deployed in an interactive fiction game called Anchorhead. This approach uses player's feedback as the basis for guiding the personalization of the interaction. The results indicate that adding our Case‐based Drama manaGer (C‐DraGer) to the game guides the players through the interaction and provides a better overall player experience. Unlike previous approaches to drama management, this article focuses on exhibiting the success of our approach by evaluating results using human players in a real game implementation. Based on this work, we report several insights on drama management which were possible only due to an evaluation with real players.