Sid Meier once famously quipped "a game is a series of meaningful choices." Today, choice structures are arguably one of the most defining characteristics of games since they represent a form of activity that effects some change in the state of the game universe (whether it be an actual change in the logic of the game or a change the player thinks actually happened).

Despite their importance, not many folks have looked at understanding what influences players when they make choices. Working in this area will involve building off prior work that I have carried out alongside colleagues to understand what we label the "determinants of player choice" in the context of interactive narratives and games.

Publications

• Ignacio X. Domínguez, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, James Vance, David L. Roberts; The Mimesis Effect: The Effect of Roles on Player Choice in Interactive Narrative Role-Playing Games. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2016), pages 3438-3449, San Jose, CA, USA, 2016.
  Awarded Honorable Mention in the Best Papers Category
  (23.4% acceptance rate; 4% honorable mention rate)

• Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, Justus Robertson, Stephen G. Ware, Brent Harrison, David L. Roberts, and R. Michael Young; Foreseeing Meaningful Choices. In Proceedings of the 10th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-14), pages 9-15, Raleigh, NC, USA, 2014.
  (28% acceptance rate for oral presentation)

• Matthew William Fendt, Brent Harrison, Stephen G. Ware, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, and David L. Roberts; Achieving the Illusion of Agency. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2012), pages 114-125, San Sebastián, Spain, 2012.
  Awarded Best Paper
  (29.2% acceptance rate)

Project Details

Name: Determinants of Player Choice

Project Stage: Harvest

Launched: 2012

Categories: Artificial Intelligence,Computational Psychology,Interactive Narrative

Tags: Choice Poetics,Player Choice,Agency

Sponsor:

Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, National Science Foundation

External Site: None.