Author-Driven Approaches to Computational Narrative Design for Games

Abstract

Accessible Head Mounted Displays (HMD) have provided mass access to Extended Reality (XR) content as never before. One of the key complaints from HMD owners, however, is the lack of substantial high-quality content (Moore 2017). Coupled with the domain-specific topic of presence, which describes a state beyond the concept of immersion instead with the user feeling part of the virtual world. Utilizing traditional production techniques cost and the duration of the resultant product are inextricably linked, although some progress reducing manual hours has been made with the introduction of Procedural Content Generation (PCG); the focus of this shift has been on asset creation rather than narratives (Kapadia et al. 2017). While PCG can reduce the cost of production it does not however directly increase the duration of the game. The current solution from developers has been to implement game mechanics to increase the duration of the game, leading to a rise in arcade-style wave shooters (Anon 2018), however, this solution is not applicable to long-form content such as narrative-based Role Playing Games (RPG), story-based first-person action games and interactive narratives. The intended contribution of this paper is both to describe the challenges to the academic knowledge in procedurally generated content and computational narratives but is also about studying how those approaches can be democratized, enabling wider adoption within the content creation community, with a view to their eventual use within non-entertainment sectors.