Dissertation
Abstract: While game studies and interactive narrative communities have developed a rich body of research around agency in our interactions with narrative systems, comparatively little research effort has been devoted to studying the system’s role in fostering, supporting, and reinforcing that agency.This dissertation offers a combined theory-design-technical exploration of a system’s ability to respond to player agency. Building upon Chris Crawford’s model of interactivity as a loop between two participants who each Listen, Think, and Speak in turn, this work considers the interactivity loop as a dynamic between a player and a system. It formulates agency as the experience of this loop from the perspective ofthe player, and incorporates current theories of agency into this model. It explores how affordances and feedback act as the means of communication between the player and system, and defines a system’s responsiveness as the degree to which a system changes its affordances and feedback as a result of player actions. The theoretical lens of responsiveness is then applied to a range of games as a design analysis tool.The technical contributions of this dissertation include a technical design analysis of the inner workings of Lume—an AI storylet system designed to offer highly responsive narrative experiences—with an eye toward examining how its technical design and component systems foster responsiveness. Finally, the dissertation offers a case study of a prototype game created with the Lume system. The case study discusses the authorial affordances of the Lume system, a range of procedural narrative design techniques, and how the components of responsiveness outlined in this dissertation can be leveraged to create a compelling narrative experience.
Journal Articles
“The Game I Mean: Game Reference, Citation and Authoritative Access.” Eric Kaltman, Stacey Mason, Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Game Studies. ISSN:1604-7982. Volume 21 issue 3, September 2021.
“On Links: Exercises in style.” Stacey Mason and Mark Bernstein. New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Volume 27, 2021 – Issue 1-2: Extensions of Invited papers from the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. Guest Editors: Claus Atzenbeck, Jessica Rubart & David E. Millard.
Conference Papers
“Cozy Mystery Construction Kit.” Max Kreminski, Devi Acharya, Nic Junius, Elisabeth Oliver, Kate Compton, Melanie Dickinson, Cyril Focht, Stacey Mason, Stella Mazeika, Noah-Wardrip Fruin. FDG ’19: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Article No.: 86, Pages 1 – 9. 2019.
“On Links: Exercises in Style.” Stacey Mason and Mark Bernstein. HT ’19: Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. 2019.
“Lume: A System for Procedural Story Generation.” Stacey Mason, Ceri Stagg, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas. The Fourteenth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’19), San Luis Obispo, CA, USA. August 26–30, 2019.
“On Games and Links: Extending the Vocabulary of Agency and Immersion in Interactive Narratives.” International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2014, Istanbul, Turkey. LNCS 8230, pp. 25– 34. November 6-9, 2013.
“TouchStory.” Claus Atzenbeck, Mark Bernstein, Marwa Al-Shafey and Stacey Mason. Proceedings from ACM Hypertext 2013, Paris, France. May 1-3, 2013.
“Glitched Lit: Possibilities for Databending Literature.” Narrative and Hypertext 2012 Proceedings: a workshop at ACM Hypertext 2012, Milwaukee, WI, USA. June 25, 2012.
“Gothic.” Mark Bernstein and Stacey Mason. Narrative and Hypertext 2012 Proceedings: a workshop at ACM Hypertext 2012, Milwaukee, WI, USA. June 25, 2012.
“The Player’s Role”. Narrative and Hypertext 2011 Proceedings: a workshop at ACM Hypertext 2011, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Charlie Hargood and David E. Millard (eds.). Southampton, GB: University of Southampton, 2012. pps 21-24.