Project Conversation

Role: Lead Programmer and Level Designer

Team: Rae Watters and Skye Winters

Development Period: September 2025 - December 2025

Software: Unity and Arcweave

Core Questions:

How do we improve gossip systems to increase NPC believability?

How do we design systems that help NPCs be aware of their surroundings and reflect said awareness during dialogue?

How do we create systems of information sharing for NPCs in a way that can be easily implemented by future developers?

Description:

Currently, while several games have methods to have NPCs interact with the player, very few typically have ways for simulating NPCs relationships to one another. However, several papers have identified that social relationships can greatly assist in increasing NPC believability (Barreto et al 2017, Warpefelt and Verhagen et al 2017).

Additionally, it has also been found that increasing an NPCs awareness of their environment can further increase NPC believability (Gnomes et al 2013). For example, this is the difference between players being able to steal from a shopkeeper with a bucket over their head (see Skyrim) vs NPCs shouting out each other's names when they are killed (see the Last of Us 2).

That then raises the question, why increase believability? NPC Believability refers to an NPC "who seems lifelike, whose actions make sense, who allows you to suspend disbelief" (Mateas 1999). A key aspect of note here is the suspension of disbelief. The reason for this is that suspension of disbelief has been shown to help with the persuasiveness and enjoyability of a narrative (Van ‘T Riet et al 2018, Oh et al 2020). Furthermore, there is the possibility that believability could increase emotional attachment to characters. Therefore, for these reasons, to make more enjoyable and impactful games it's important to consider believability.

The role of this prototype is meant to serve as a case study of a potential gossip system implementation being developed by my thesis partner Rae and I. While several previous solutions have worked from the ground up defining a method for implementing a gossip system, our is instead a combination of a variety of papers proposals in order to take advantage of each their strengths (McCoy et al 2011, Kreminski 2023, Mooney and Allbeck 2014, Ryan and Mateas 2019). Additionally, a large gap we have found so far in the literature is a lack of methods of validation and implementations in publically playable games of these systems (Liao et al. 2013, do Couto et al. 2016). As such, we are designing it in such a way that we can do A / B testing within a custom built game we are devleoping to validate the gossip system's functionality. From their we hope to publish our findings and the game.

To accomplish this, we decided to create a short narrative that would last around 10-15 minutes that can be later expanded upon in future studies. Additionally, the narrative is set during a party in order to give the most ideal situation for gossiping to occur for the spread of information.

Overall, through this project, we hope to improve our gossip system to increase NPC believability and provide evidence of its validity. From doing so, we hope future designers will be able to use our framework we are developing to create more engaging social gameplay within a video games context. Furthermore, we hope it will help designers make more informed choices about what aspects of real world gossip systems are beneficial in a gameplay context for enhancing NPCs.

Methodology:

To see the process of creating these prototypes and developing this project, take a look at the following blog posts:

Week 1: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/the-start-of-another-journey

Week 2: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/the-hydra-that-is-a-thesis

Week 3: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/one-more-step-forwards

Week 4: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/prototyping-the-prototype

Week 5: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/good-old-research

Week 6: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/what-s-one-more-study

Week 7: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/back-to-the-drawing-board

Week 8: https://skyewinters16.wixsite.com/skye-winters/post/failing-quickly

Takeaways:

Check back later!