Investigating the Influence of Behaviors and Dialogs on Player Enjoyment in Stealth Games

Abstract

The player's perception of AI behavior significantly influences their overall game experience. This perception is shaped by both interactive encounters and careful observations, particularly in genres like stealth, where gameplay revolves around planning strategies based on AI enemy movement. This paper aims to derive general insights into the player experience concerning two crucial gameplay elements that impact the perception of NPC intelligence. The first element pertains to the actual behavior of opponent NPCs, while the second focuses on the dialogues employed to highlight NPC decision-making. We conducted a user study to assess whether players can discern between complex and simple NPC behavior during gameplay in a specific scenario of a top-down stealth game prototype. We introduced variations in spoken dialogs to determine their effect on player perception. In the end, our findings revealed that when simple dialogs were used, players derived greater enjoyment from a more complex AI behavior. However, using contextual dialog allowed a simple behavior to match a complex behavior in player enjoyment.