research-article

WORLD4: Designing Ambiguity for First-Person Exploration Games

Authors:

Alexander Muscat,

Jonathan DuckworthAuthors Info & Claims

CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

Pages 341 - 351

https://doi.org/10.1145/3242671.3242705

Published: 23 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper we present the design and evaluation of a first-person walker digital game called WORLD4. Walkers are a sub-genre of 3D games that typically include minimal player interaction, slow paced game play, and ambiguous goals. Walking is the primary means of interaction in walker games, rather than prioritize 'skill-based' mechanics. However, the design of these game environments is not well understood and challenges many accepted game design conventions. We have designed WORLD4, a multi-dimensional first-person exploration game, to explore how ambiguity might support exploratory game play experiences in virtual environments. 14 participants playtest WORLD4 and analysis of the data identified three descriptive themes specific to the walker game player experience: 1) designing partial inscrutability; 2) shifting meaning; and 3) facilitating subversion of expectations. We use these themes to describe a set of prescriptive design strategies that may assist designers in designing for ambiguity in exploratory game environments.

References

[1]

Roger Caillois. 1961. Man, play, and games. Free Press of Glencoe, New York.

[2]

Kathy Charmaz. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis. SAGE.

[3]

Greg Costikyan. 2013. Uncertainty in Games (Reprint edition ed.). The MIT Press.

Digital Library

[4]

Katherine Cross. 2015. How "walking simulators" allow us to touch other worlds. Gamasutra. Retrieved September 29, 2015 from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/251191/How_walking_simulators_allow_us_to_touch_other_worlds.php

[5]

Katherine Cross. 2016. Come Back: Dear Esther 's devs and walking simulators 9 years on. Retrieved November 20, 2016 from http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/282791/Come_Back_Dear_Esthers_devs_and_walking_simulators_9_years_on.php

[6]

Rob Daviau and Matt Leacock. 2017. Board Game Design Day: The Making of "Pandemic Legacy." Game Developers Conference 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2018 from https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024300/Board-Game-Design-Day-The

[7]

Ed Key & David Kanaga. 2013. Proteus.

[8]

William Empson. 1966. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New Directions, New York.

[9]

Fullbright. 2013. Gone Home.

[10]

Galactic Cafe. 2013. The Stanley Parable.

[11]

William Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford. 2003. Ambiguity as a Resource for Design. In SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (1), 233--240.

Digital Library

[12]

Ayse Gursoy. 2013. Game Worlds: A Study of Video Game Criticism. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

[13]

Kenneth Hullett and Jim Whitehead. 2010. Design Patterns in FPS Levels. In The 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games.

Digital Library

[14]

Independent Games Festival. 2018. IGF. IGF. Retrieved February 14, 2018 from http://igf.com/

[15]

Henry Jenkins. 2004. Game Design as Narrative Architecture. In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, Game. Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 118--130.

[16]

Adriaan de Jongh. 2017. Playtesting: Avoiding Evil Data. Game Developers Conference 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2018 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EUeYu0aPn4

[17]

Brendan Keogh. 2015. On Everybody's Gone To The Rapture. brkeogh.com. Retrieved January 15, 2016 from http://brkeogh.com/2015/08/14/on-everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture/

[18]

Raph Koster. 2004. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (1st ed.). Paraglyph Press.

Digital Library

[19]

Rudolf Kremers. 2009. Level Design: Concept, Theory, and Practice (1 edition ed.). A K Peters/CRC Press, Wellesley, MA.

[20]

Margaret Diane LeCompte and Jean J. Schensul. 2010. Designing & Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction. Rowman Altamira.

[21]

George Loewenstein. 1994. The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116, 1 (July 1994), 75--98.

[22]

Kevin Lynch. 1960. The Image of the City. MIT Press.

[23]

Ian MacLarty. 2017. The Catacombs of Solaris. Retrieved February 27, 2018 from https://ianmaclarty.itch.io/catacombs-of-solaris

[24]

Alexander Muscat, William Goddard, Jonathan Duckworth, and Jussi Holopainen. 2016. First-Person Walkers: Understanding the Walker Experience through Four Design Themes. In DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_318.pdf

[25]

Celia Pearce. 2007. Narrative Environments. In Space Time Play. 200--205. Retrieved September 20, 2013 from http://www.springerlink.com/index/K60151100T033RG1.pdf

[26]

Lana Polansky. 2015. Against Flow. Sufficiently Human. Retrieved January 28, 2018 from http://sufficientlyhuman.com/archives/995

[27]

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press.

Digital Library

[28]

Jesse Schell. 2008. The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses (1st ed.). Morgan Kaufmann.

Digital Library

[29]

Miguel Sicart. 2014. Play Matters (1 edition ed.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts London.

Digital Library

[30]

Brian Sutton-Smith. 2001. The Ambiguity of Play (Revised ed. edition ed.). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

[31]

The Chinese Room. 2012. Dear Esther.

[32]

Alexandra To, Safinah Ali, Geoff Kaufman, and Jessica Hammer. 2016. Integrating Curiosity and Uncertainty in Game Design. In DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_428.pdf

[33]

Christopher W. Totten. 2014. An Architectural Approach to Level Design. A K Peters/CRC Press, Boca Raton.

[34]

Steffen P. Walz. 2010. Toward a Ludic Architecture: The Space of Play and Games. ETC Press.

Digital Library

Cited By

Zhu Y(2024)A Review of Game Design Techniques for Evoking and Managing CuriosityArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_9(111-126)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_9
Keogh BHardwick T(2023)Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher EducationGames and Culture10.1177/15554120231176874(155541202311768)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231176874
Aghajari ZBaumer EDiFranzo D(2023)Reviewing Interventions to Address Misinformation: The Need to Expand Our Vision Beyond an Individualistic FocusProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795207:CSCW1(1-34)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579520
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

WORLD4: Designing Ambiguity for First-Person Exploration Games
1. Applied computing
  1. Computers in other domains
    1. Personal computers and PC applications
      1. Computer games

Recommendations

I-dentity: concealing movement representation associations in games
CHI EA '14: CHI '14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This paper details the design of i-dentity, a collaborative movement-based game where the game design deliberately conceals the players' associations to a digital representation. While movement-based digital games typically make it clear whose movement ...
Can "Gaming 2.0" help design "Serious Games"?: a comparative study
Sandbox '10: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games

The "Serious Games" field raises a specific need. People without professional game design skills, such as teachers, corporate trainers, therapists and advertising professionals, request tools that could allow them to create or modify such games. This ...
The Cognitive Processing Mechanism for the Players' Rule in MMO Game
WI-IAT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 03

The goal of this research is to explore the cognitive processing mechanism for players’ rule. Based on the protocol analysis on data collected from the player’s playing experience in Massively Multi-player Online (MMO) game, we construct a Goal Operator ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 2018

563 pages

ISBN:9781450356244

DOI:10.1145/3242671

General Chairs:
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller
Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
,
Daniel Johnson
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
,
Ben Schouten
Eindhoven University of Technology and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands
,
Program Chairs:
Phoebe O. Toups Dugas
Play & Interactive Experiences for Learning Lab, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA
,
Peta Wyeth
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2018

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

CHI PLAY '18

Sponsor:

SIGCHI

CHI PLAY '18: The annual symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 28 - 31, 2018

VIC, Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

CHI PLAY '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 123 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

8
Total Citations
View Citations
266
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)33
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)7

Reflects downloads up to 23 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Zhu Y(2024)A Review of Game Design Techniques for Evoking and Managing CuriosityArtsIT, Interactivity and Game Creation10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_9(111-126)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55312-7_9
Keogh BHardwick T(2023)Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher EducationGames and Culture10.1177/15554120231176874(155541202311768)Online publication date: 29-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120231176874
Aghajari ZBaumer EDiFranzo D(2023)Reviewing Interventions to Address Misinformation: The Need to Expand Our Vision Beyond an Individualistic FocusProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35795207:CSCW1(1-34)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579520
Zhang HCao LHowell GSchwartz DPeng C(2023)An educational virtual reality game for learning historical eventsVirtual Reality10.1007/s10055-023-00845-527:4(2895-2909)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-023-00845-5
Johansen Svan Berkel NFritsch J(2022)Characterising Soundscape Research in Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3532106.3533458(1394-1417)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3532106.3533458
Lee NMorimoto KLasczik AIrwin RCutter-Mackenzie-Knowles ARousell DLee N(2022)Walking Curricular Paths in the Virtual: The Stanley Parable and MinecraftWalking with A/r/tography10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_3(39-58)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88612-7_3
Tyack AMekler EKitamura YQuigley AIsbister KIgarashi TBjørn PDrucker S(2021)Off-Peak: An Examination of Ordinary Player ExperienceProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445230(1-12)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445230
Tyack AWyeth PJohnson DBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)Restorative Play: Videogames Improve Player Wellbeing After a Need-Frustrating EventProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376332(1-15)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376332

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents