Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

Game Plot Design with an LLM-powered Assistant: An Empirical Study with Game Designers

Seyed Hossein Alavi, Weijia Xu, Nebojsa Jojic, Daniel Kennett, Raymond T. Ng, Sudha Rao, Haiyan Zhang, Bill Dolan, Vered Shwartz

TL;DR

GamePlot is introduced, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process.

Abstract

We introduce GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process. Our user study with 14 game designers shows high levels of both satisfaction with the generated game plots and sense of ownership over the narratives, but also reconfirms that LLM are limited in their ability to generate complex and truly innovative content. We also show that diverse user populations have different expectations from AI assistants, and encourage researchers to study how tailoring assistants to diverse user groups could potentially lead to increased job satisfaction and greater creativity and innovation over time.

Game Plot Design with an LLM-powered Assistant: An Empirical Study with Game Designers

TL;DR

GamePlot is introduced, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process.

Abstract

We introduce GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process. Our user study with 14 game designers shows high levels of both satisfaction with the generated game plots and sense of ownership over the narratives, but also reconfirms that LLM are limited in their ability to generate complex and truly innovative content. We also show that diverse user populations have different expectations from AI assistants, and encourage researchers to study how tailoring assistants to diverse user groups could potentially lead to increased job satisfaction and greater creativity and innovation over time.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 36 sections, 3 figures, 10 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Background
  3. LLMs in Gaming.
  4. LLMs for Creative Writing.
  5. GamePlot
  6. Design Room
  7. Game Story Development.
  8. Plot.
  9. Feedback Elicitation.
  10. Game Room
  11. Game Window.
  12. Designer Control.
  13. Implementation Details
  14. User Study
  15. Participants
  16. ...and 21 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: An illustration of the GamePlot design room. The right pane shows the opening story, LLM instructions, and game and player turns as designers refine the narrative. The left pane includes buttons for generating story content, creating plots, saving and loading progress, and editable sections for plot and feedback features (located below the plot area).
  • Figure 2: An illustration of the GamePlot game room. Left: game window from the designer's perspective, where the game is played. Middle: left pane of the player view, including room and user information, and gameplay instructions. Right: left pane of the designer view, including an editable text area prefilled with the plot and the list of NPCs that appeared so far in the game window. For each NPC, designers (but not players) see a list of hidden states (e.g., backstory, persona, mood, and thought). By toggling the Ctl button, designers can take control of that NPC and use the Wizard of Oz feature.
  • Figure 3: Distribution of participants by experience level. The majority of participants had more than 1 year of experience, while those with less than 1 year of game design experience had significant experience in narrative design.