Prom Week: Designing past the game/story dilemma.
Josh McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, Aaron A. Reed, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip–Fruin · 2013
New player experiences require new game designs – and some designs only become possible with new technology. Emergent narratives are part of existing story games but the game systems are not capable of understanding the stories their players create. If we could capture the enjoyable aspects of player-driven narratives while still keeping the complex dynamism of sandbox games, we could enable a new type of game experience. Creating this experience would require fundamental technical research to enable new kinds of authorial affordances. This paper presents the lessons learned while designing the game Prom Week and AI system Comme il Faut together to produce such an experience — a two and a half year process of research-driven game design. Prom Week tightly combines player experiences of choice and consequence (as found, for example, in simulation games and combat systems) with experiences of specific characters, histories, language, and narrative conclusions (as found in the non-interactive, or minimally-interactive, fictions of many games). This combination was accomplished by creating novel technology informed by the design problem, experimenting with gameplay approaches appropriate to the technology, iterating on both using player feedback, and finally executing a unique design providing satisfying stories that reflect the player's choices in a wide possibility space.