Fantastical Narrative Structures, and How to Evaluate Them: Evaluating Continuation Desire in Interactive Narratives

Nielsen, Frederik Ditlev Frøling ; Chieu, Patrick Øllegaard

4. term

Medialogy, Master

2017

2017-06-02

140 pages

I kraft af at spilindustrien bliver ved med at vokse sig større og større, stiger behovet ligeledes for præcise metoder til at måle hvad der holder spillere engageret i at spille spil. Selvom at måle f.eks. “Engagement”, “Flow” eller “Immersion” uden tvivl er vigtigt for fremtiden af spiludvikling, argumenterer vi for at lysten til at fortsætte med at spille, er helt essentiel for et spils succes. Vores problemformulering lyder: "How can a test methodology framework be designed to evaluate continuation desire in interactive narratives, in a way that gives deeper insight into the specific causes of engagement, and how does the presentation of narrative structures affect players' level of continuation desire?" Resultatet af vores eksperiment, som blev udført for at evaluere hvorvidt vores framework var en succes, viste at det var istand til at måle lysten til at fortsætte, men viste ydermere at der er brug for mere arbejde for at bekræfte dens validitet. Ydermere tager frameworket ikke højde for hvor meget hver kategori bidrager til den egentlige lyst til at fortsætte. Afslutningsvist viste vores eksperiment at narrative strukturer ikke har signifikant påvirkning på spilleres lyst til at fortsætte med at spille, men at visse strukturer kan påvirke deres lyst til at genspille spillet.

As the game-industry keeps growing larger and larger, the need for accurate ways of measuring what keeps players engaged with a game grows accordingly. While measuring e.g. engagement, flow or immersion in games are, no doubt, important for the future of game development, we argue that the desire to continuation is absolutely essential for a game's success. "How can a test methodology framework be designed to evaluate continuation desire in interactive narratives, in a way that gives deeper insight into the specific causes of engagement, and how does the presentation of narrative structures affect players' level of continuation desire?" Based upon research in topics such as engagement, interactive narratives and continuation desire, we constructed a methodological framework for measuring continuation desire in an interactive narrative game, allowing insight into the attributing factors. This framework was used to evaluate different narrative structures’ affect on continuation desire. The results of the experiment, conducted to evaluate the success of the framework, showed that the framework is, indeed, able to measure continuation desire, but also shows that further work is required to ultimately confirm its validity. Furthermore, the framework doesn’t take into account how much each category of continuation desire contributes to the overall score. Finally, the experiment shows that narrative structures does not have a significant impact on players’ continuation desire, but some structures might affect players’ desire to re-play a game.

Interactive Narratives ; Continuation Desire ; Engagement ; Games ; Eliza Effect ; Flow ; Immersion

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