Michael Mateas’s research while affiliated with University of California, Santa Cruz and other places

Simulationist interactive narrative systems allow game makers to craft reactive stories driven by simulated characters and their social dynamics. These systems produce narrative experiences that feel more emergent but may lack a coherent plot structure. We explored how to combine the emergent possibilities of social simulation with a procedural narrative system that affords writers strong authorial control over the plot. We did this by developing a Unity extension called Anansi that helps people create social simulation-driven visual novels. It enables users to inject simulation data into their story dialogue using logical queries and parameterized storylets written using Ink. The paper describes an overview of our extension and how we empower writers to drive narrative progression using cascading social effects from player choices.

Visual novels are a popular game genre for educational games. However, they often feature pre-authored plot structures that cannot dynamically adjust to the player’s progression through learning objectives. Employing procedural storytelling techniques boosts plot dynamism, but this comes at the cost of needing a larger repository of content (dialogue and images) to support different learning progressions and objectives. In this paper, we present postmortem-style case studies describing the lessons we learned from attempting to integrate large-language models (LLMs) and text-to-image models into the development of an educational visual novel about responsible conduct of research. Specifically, we discuss our experiences employing generative AI in our dialogue, character sprite, and background image creation processes.

Video games act as engines that communicate aspects of experience through player interaction. We argue that this communication of first-person experience (qualia) is unique in its ability to interact with a player's mind-body in a potent and observable way. Unfortunately for designers and researchers, many of the desirable traits of video games are not inherently measurable via traditional, quantitative means-they are emergent properties dependent on the perspectives with which they are observed. This paper investigates the work of video game designers as it relates to phenomenology and embodied cognition and lays out a path for future researchers and designers to leverage phenomenology as a foundation for video game creation. We offer that the intersection between embodied cognition, game design, and phenomenology suggests a path from descriptions of conscious experiences (qualia) to real, distributable design recommendations in video game design and study.

Acculturative stress disproportionately impacts first-generation Latine-Americans, leading to significant mental health risks stemming from intergenerational cultural norms around gender identity and sexuality. Facilitating communication is critical in reducing this stress, yet it can be challenging for Latine individuals to take the first step in expanding their views due to limited resources, cultural pressure, and motivational needs. On the other hand, serious games provide a unique opportunity to address this challenge by introducing novel experiences to encourage the growth of perspectives in acculturative norms. This article presents a narrative review that bridges three key concepts: (1) acculturative stress in Latine-American communities, (2) modern behavior change theory and model, and (3) the design of serious games. We conclude by proposing a framework for Acculturative Game Design (AGD) and discuss considerations for fostering the support of intergenerational relationships around Latine identity.

Story generators using language models offer the automatic production of highly fluent narrative content, but they are hard to control and understand, seizing creative tasks that many authors wish to perform themselves. On the other hand, planning-based story generators are highly controllable and easily understood but require story domains that must be laboriously crafted; further, they lack the capacity for fluent language generation. In this paper, we explore hybrid approaches that aim to bridge the gap between language models and narrative planners. First, we demonstrate that language models can be used to author narrative planning domains from natural language stories with minimal human intervention. Second, we explore the reverse, demonstrating that we can use logical story domains and plans to produce stories that respect the narrative commitments of the planner. In doing so, we aim to build a foundation for human-centric authoring tools that facilitate novel creative experiences.

An ability to morally reason is crucial to the believability of many fictional characters, from Jane Austen’s heroines to the denizens of The Good Place. These works often foreground the complexity of moral questions and the circumstances un- der which different forms of behavior might be justified. Morality is also foregrounded in many games, from Black and White to Mass Effect 3. Yet, most in-game characters judge other characters (or the player) based on a single reputation scale or binary values of right and wrong. There has been little exploration in games of the relationship between char- acter values and beliefs and moral reasoning. In keeping with this year’s conference theme, “Oh the Humanity,” this design postmortem paper describes the design and development of Argument Box, a model of moral argumentation and reason- ing based on Lakoff’s metaphor theory of moral politics. We describe our design approach, iterations, and authoring con- cerns — covering what went right and wrong in our attempts to model morality-based argumentation for believable game characters.