Interactive Fiction Games Research Articles

Exploring the Potential of Using a Text-Based Game to Inform Simulation Models of Risky Migration Decisions

Background In this paper, we explore the potential of games to collect empirical data for informing agent-based simulation models of migration. To examine the usefulness of game-based approaches, we conducted a simple, yet carefully designed psychological experiment. Methods In a preregistered study, we used a novel, immersive experimental setting to investigate the risky migration decisions made by migrants and non-migrants. Participants (284 migrants and 284 non-migrants) played a choice-based interactive fiction game—a fully text-based game where players progress by selecting from a list of possible actions—that involved making three risky migration decisions. In one condition, participants were shown a non-linear progress bar and explicit acknowledgements of the choices they made to promote perceived agency: the feeling that one’s actions have a non-trivial impact on the game. In the other condition, the progress bar was linear, and the explicit acknowledgements were omitted. Results Our experimental manipulation was successful; participants in the former condition self-reported higher perceived agency than participants in the latter condition, as did migrants compared to non-migrants. Nevertheless, condition and migrant status did not meaningfully affect the risky migration decisions participants made in the game. Conclusion These findings indicate that the results of generic studies on risky migration decisions conducted on non-migrants can potentially inform simulation models of migration. However, these findings were obtained from a single experiment, and thus warrant replication and further research before definitive conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, a simple text-based game may be too superficial to allow deep insights into the idiosyncrasies of migration decision-making. This suggests a possible trade-off between clear interpretability of the results and the usefulness for informing simulation models of complex social processes, such as migration.

Investigating immersion and migration decisions for agent-based modelling: A cautionary tale

Background Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is that standard surveys or experiments may lack ecological validity, limiting the extent to which research findings can be generalised to real-life settings. For complex, highly emotive decision-making scenarios, such as those related to migration, the typically used short, methodical survey questions may not appropriately map onto complex real-world decisions of interest. Immersive contexts may offer more accurate representations of reality, potentially enhancing the usefulness of experimental information in multi-disciplinary modelling endeavours. Methods This pre-registered study of migration decisions, aimed at informing a multi-disciplinary construction of an agent-based model of migration, presents a choice-based interactive fiction game in which players make migration decisions to advance through a story. Participants (N = 1000 Prolific users) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, three involving different renditions of the game attempting to create immersion, with the last condition presenting the decisions in standard survey format. Results Although addressing the lack of ecological validity in survey data is important for improving agent-based modelling methodology, the experimental design used to tackle this issue, while responding directly to modelling needs, proved too complex. The created experimental conditions ended up too distinct from each other, involving stimuli that differed in quantity and content. This introduced several unintended and uncontrolled confounds, making it impossible to meaningfully interpret the results of this experiment on its own. Our results act as a cautionary tale for agent-based modellers, highlighting that the modelling needs should not override the principles of experimental design, and provide motivation for more rigorous research on this topic.

Imparting Systems Engineering Experience via Interactive Fiction Serious Games

Serious games for education are becoming increasing popular. Interactive fiction games are some of the most popular in app stores and are also beginning to be heavily used in education to teach analysis and decision-making. Noting that it is difficult for systems engineers to experience all necessary situations which prepare them for the role of a chief engineer, in this paper, we explore the use of interactive fiction serious games to impart systems engineering experience and to teach systems engineering principles. The results of a cognitive viability, qualitative viability, and replayability analysis of 14 systems engineering serious games developed in the interactive fiction genre are presented. The analysis demonstrates that students with a systems engineering background are able to learn the Twine gaming engine and create a serious game aligned to the Apply level of Bloom’s Taxonomy which conveys a systems engineering experience and teaches a systems engineering principle within a four-week period of time. These quickly generated games cognitive, quality, and replayability scores indicate they provide some opportunity for high-level thinking, are of high quality, and with above average replayability, are likely to be played multiple times and/or recommended to others.

Investigating immersion and migration decisions for agent-based modelling: A cautionary tale

Background: Agent-based modelling provides an appealing methodological choice for simulating human behaviour and decisions. The currently-dominant approaches based on static transition rates or unverified assumptions are restrictive, and could be enhanced with insights from cognitive experiments on actual decision making. Here, one common concern is that standard surveys or experiments may lack ecological validity, limiting the extent to which research findings can be generalised to real-life settings. For complex, highly emotive decision-making scenarios, such as those related to migration, the typically-used short, methodical survey questions may not appropriately map onto complex real-world decisions of interest. Immersive contexts may offer more accurate representations of reality, potentially enhancing the usefulness of experimental information in multi-disciplinary modelling endeavours. Methods: This pre-registered study of migration decisions, aimed at informing a multi-disciplinary construction of an agent-based model of migration, presents a choice-based interactive fiction game in which players make migration decisions to advance through a story. Participants (N = 1000 Prolific users) were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions, three involving different renditions of the game attempting to create immersion, with the last condition presenting the decisions in standard survey format. Results: Although addressing the lack of ecological validity in survey data is important for improving agent-based modelling methodology, the experimental design used to tackle this issue, while responding directly to modelling needs, proved too complex. The created experimental conditions ended up too distinct from each other, involving stimuli that differed in quantity and content. This introduced several unintended and uncontrolled confounds, making it impossible to meaningfully interpret the results of this experiment on its own. Our results act as a cautionary tale for agent-based modellers, highlighting that the modelling needs should not override the principles of experimental design, and provide motivation for more rigorous research on this topic.

A Survey of Text Games for Reinforcement Learning Informed by Natural Language

Abstract Reinforcement Learning has shown success in a number of complex virtual environments. However, many challenges still exist towards solving problems with natural language as a core component. Interactive Fiction Games (or Text Games) are one such problem type that offer a set of safe, partially observable environments where natural language is required as part of the Reinforcement Learning solution. Therefore, this survey’s aim is to assist in the development of new Text Game problem settings and solutions for Reinforcement Learning informed by natural language. Specifically, this survey: 1) introduces the challenges in Text Game Reinforcement Learning problems, 2) outlines the generation tools for rendering Text Games and the subsequent environments generated, and 3) compares the agent architectures currently applied to provide a systematic review of benchmark methodologies and opportunities for future researchers.

Customizable crying and connection: personalization and its effect on player emotion and empathy

Player choice sets video games apart from other visual media, and narrative designers work with game developers to implement tools that allow players to make choices and feel involved. Prior research focuses on games that include emotional themes and character customization, which are seen as effective ways to create empathy between player and protagonist. However, most research compares different games with various levels of customization, opening doors to several confounding variables. To address this gap, it is essential to explore how character customization and narrative context influence player emotion, character connection, morality, and engagement in a single game. This study involved participants playing a custom-built interactive fiction game demo (MOSAIC). Overall, players’ attitudes toward the demo were consistent across all three experimental groups and the control group, although character connection was higher in groups where participants were given additional story information and/or opportunities to customize the protagonist. This is a valuable step towards understanding video games and player emotion, especially considering gaming’s global presence and constant expansion.

“Pay for your choices”: Deconstructing neoliberal choice through free-to-play mobile interactive fiction games

This article studied the neoliberal ideas of choice and agency manifested in the structures of two interactive fiction or “choose-your-own-adventure” games, Choices: Stories you Play and Episode—Choose Your Story, and their free-to-play profit system to explore the hegemonic operation of neoliberalism and participatory resistances to it. Neoliberal choice was approached as a strategy that operates by encouraging an actualization of one’s best self yet inscribing what it should entail. Despite the rhetoric of agency and fictitious simulation, the “best” choices and endings in the games were visible and accessible only with cultural, economic, and temporal capitals. “Right” choices required legitimate taste which needs savviness in dominant readings or time investment, and the “right est” choices required monetary investment. However, players’ subversive choices such as intentionally choosing “(not) rightly” to pursue negotiated readings and collective participation hinted at the potential of tactical practices in creating new strategies.

Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and communicate with language. Interactive Fiction games are fully text-based simulation environments where a player issues text commands to effect change in the environment and progress through the story. We argue that IF games are an excellent testbed for studying language-based autonomous agents. In particular, IF games combine challenges of combinatorial action spaces, language understanding, and commonsense reasoning. To facilitate rapid development of language-based agents, we introduce Jericho, a learning environment for man-made IF games and conduct a comprehensive study of text-agents across a rich set of games, highlighting directions in which agents can improve.

Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room: Using feminist game design to look at and beyond the male gaze in Swift’s The Lady’s Dressing Room.

In 2017, I developed “Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room,” an Interactive Fiction game based on Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1734) to help my students become better readers of Restoration satire, and poetry generally. I did this for two reasons: to test whether the digital mediation of game-playing could help my undergraduate students more fruitfully engage with the poem, and 2) to theorize the similarities between poetic interpretation, the multiple narrative-making experience of game-playing. This article takes seriously the idea that poetry is play. It describes the circumstances that led to the development of the game and why Swift’s poem seemed an appropriate site for such experimentation. Crucial to game construction is a commitment to theories feminist game design that complement the poem’s own indictment of sexist determinism. With meditations on the affinity between poems and games, an examination of preceding experiments of literary translation into the ludic digital, details on game construction and local objectives, this article reflects on how digital mediation suggests a self-conscious mode of reading as a phenomenon of fictional world building. I don’t mean to suggest that this approach is necessarily appropriate for every poem or that every poem can be translated into the digital sphere in this way; rather, I want to share how the case of Entering the Lady’s Dressing Room suggests that the experience of translating a poem into Interactive Fiction can contribute to the formation of careful, detail-oriented reading practices in undergraduate readers. And poetry, if nothing else, is about the details.

New Learning Scenarios with Chatbots – Conversational Learning with Jix: from Digital Tutors to Serious Interactive Fiction Games

Conversational user interfaces, aka chatbots, offer new ways of interaction that can be used not only for task-led applications, but also for learning itself. Conversational learning offers a variety of new and extensive options to support individuals through the learning process and to push the boundaries of classroom based learning. This document shows three application scenarios that have been realized with time4you’s conversational learning software Jix. After having read this text, you will have a better idea of what conversational learning is, how it can be used in learning and development, and what is critical for its success.

Interactive Fictional Dialogue Games as Arts-Based Research

Abstract Using an interactive fictional dialogue game as an example, I argue that digital games are an artful way to represent research such that creating interactive digital games can be seen as an art-making process and likewise a way to analyze and understand research data. The interactive fictional dialogue game featured herein constitutes arts-based research (ABR) focusing on new media as the art medium. First, I discuss fiction writing as arts-based research practice to establish the possibilities and range of ABR. Then, I extend the concept of fiction writing to incorporate interactive fiction, a game genre, and discuss the potential of interactivity as the core characteristic of new media and new media-based scholarship. Further, through the example of a fictional dialogue game on avatar-making created using Twine, I argue that interactive fiction games are a kind of arts-based research.

DRAMA MANAGEMENT AND PLAYER MODELING FOR INTERACTIVE FICTION GAMES

A growing research community is working toward employing drama management components in story‐based games. These components gently guide the story toward a narrative arc that improves the player's gaming experience. In this article we evaluate a novel drama management approach deployed in an interactive fiction game called Anchorhead. This approach uses player's feedback as the basis for guiding the personalization of the interaction. The results indicate that adding our Case‐based Drama manaGer (C‐DraGer) to the game guides the players through the interaction and provides a better overall player experience. Unlike previous approaches to drama management, this article focuses on exhibiting the success of our approach by evaluating results using human players in a real game implementation. Based on this work, we report several insights on drama management which were possible only due to an evaluation with real players.

Mechanisms: new media and the forensic imagination

In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage--the hard drive in particular--arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between forensic materiality and formal materiality, Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson's electronic poem Agrippa. Drawing on newly available archival resources for these works, Kirschenbaum uses a hex editor and disk image of Mystery House to conduct a forensic walkthrough to explore critical reading strategies linked to technical praxis; examines the multiple versions and revisions of Afternoon in order to address the diachronic dimension of electronic textuality; and documents the volatile publication and transmission history of Agrippa as an illustration of the social aspect of transmission and preservation.

Growing Hope: A Playwrights Dreams and Guesses about Young Audiences

Growing Hope:A Playwrights Dreams and Guesses about Young Audiences Virginia Glasgow Koste (bio) Author's Note: This column is a reduced, revised transcription of a presentation at the national symposium on "Theatre for Young Audiences: Principles and Strategies for the Future " (University of Kansas, October, 1986). This is an auspicious occasion—one which, as a child that I know once said "fills you with awe and s'picion." To be asked to divine or propose "principles and strategies for the future of theatre for young audiences" awes me to the very bone. In response to the request in 1924 to "tell us what is destined to be the immediate future of the drama," G.B. Shaw gave the only honest answer possible: "How the deuce do I know?" Like each moment of a good play, the future transformed into the present always surprises even when expected. Still, sometimes a great wit can unwittingly prophesy; Shaw, in that same interview sixty-odd years ago, off-handedly remarked: "America invented the typewriter, and a very little extra ingenuity would suffice to invent an attachment which would turn out what used to be called in Scribe's time a well-made play." So—playfully—he predicted with soul-shuddering accuracy the computer composing that is now a reality—and the computer kind of mind that cranks out itty-bitty-skitty imitation soaps for young audiences. Anyway, not being Shaw, I do confess to some dreams and hopes and guesses—not for my own life-span, but for my yearling grandbaby's? These things need time, after all; a dream instantly realized is like a raisin in the sun-lamp. So, first a quick collage of Signs of Our Times. In September Newsweek reported "the Babylodie, a battery-operated device inserted between the plastic and the padding of a diaper; at the first sign of wetness, it plays a sprightly rendition of 'When The Saints Go Marching In'." The picture that this conjures? A couple of decades from now, a group of people standing, enchanted, in Preservation Hall in New Orleans; the music begins; a well-groomed adult says, "Oh, my God?!" And in May, Newsweek, reporting on current trends in playthings, noted "a 'touch-sensitive' doll named Pamela that contains the same amount of memory as the first IBM personal computer. . touch her nose, and she says, That's my nose, where's your nose?' " Another "best-seller is a teddy-bear with an integrated circuit that 'hears' what a child says and then repeats it." Nolan Bushneil, builder of the first video game, predicts that "by 2000 . . . 50 percent of all domestic pets will be electronic." And a twelve-year-old boy is quoted on the new infra-red light-beam game: "It's better than tag because tag's gotten so boring. You just can't catch anyone. With Lazer Tag you can get 'em from far away." The touch is gone from the ancient, universal ritual of pursuit-and-escape. Control is remote. And imagining is packaged. The "entertainment software market" now offers "interactive fiction games which turn the player into the protagonist in vivid scenarios. . . the fun comes from switching life-styles like so many suits of clothes." A current catalogue offers a new book of bedtime stories with the claim that it is "a lifesaver for all busy, tired mommies and daddies who cringe at the cry, 'Tell me a bedtime story.' This hardcover book satisfies that request without stretching your good humor . . . to its limits. You'll find a total of 58 stories, each of them new, appealing, and instructive in an entertaining way, and each one takes just two short minutes to read to sleepyheads." The United States is the world's number one source of Nobel Prizewinners and Olympic champions, number one in computer production and quantity of books published annually. But it ranks fifteenth in preventing maternal death during childbirth, and twenty-fifth in avoiding low birth-weight in babies. More than a quarter of a century ago, in 1959, the U.N. Declaration of the Rights of the Child included "the right to full opportunity for play." But in Tennessee at this...