One More Step Forwards

In the following blog post, I discuss my updates with my new direction for my meta analysis, Rae’s and I’s progress on beginning our joint thesis, and a new narrative project that Rae and I are designing. I also revisit an old project that may be coming back to life.

Developments In Thesis

Overview

For this week, the main goal was to start getting the projects coming up this semester up and running. To help with this I decided to create a flow chart that would help track the progress of each of my projects (shown below). 

Image of timelines for projects currently under development

Meta Analysis

For this week in my meta analysis, we began looking into identifying articles for our meta analysis. To do so we were taught how to navigate a research database and use search term combinations to identify relevant articles. In the end, my terms ended up being 

(“Narrative Transportation*” OR “Suspension of Disbelief” OR “Being Hooked” OR “Mysticism Scale” OR “Transportation Theory” OR “Poetic Faith” OR “Immersion”) AND (“Attitude*” OR “Perception*” OR “Intention*” OR “Persuasi*” OR “Belief*”)

Using that, I was able to identify a large collection of articles and will be beginning to narrow down the list to ten for the initial wave before then coding the papers.

Research Through Design

For this week, Rae and I began working to narrow down what the exact premise of our prototype would be. Through our conversation, we ended up deciding to do a simple gameplay segment where our protagonist is arriving at this year's Spirit Celebration which is their worlds equivalent of a Prom like event but your companion is the spirit you were born with. However, on this night, the protagonist and their spirit begin to realize that the feeling of offness they have always felt with how they were treated may be more than just a feeling. It turns out that the spirit may have been identified as the wrong type resulting in the protagonist being misidentified their entire life (hence the trans analogy). Yet, as they try to piece this together, they must be careful what they say and how much they let on since it's a small town where everyone knows everyone and depending on who finds out that the protagonist is talking about this could have drastic repercussions. Can they make it to the end of the night unscathed? What secrets will be revealed about the town? And who can you trust to help you figure it out?

As far as the actual prototyping goes, I then went into Unity and began creating a few mock ups of different systems. In total I made three different versions of a simple conversation between yourself and two other NPCs.

Version One: The player speaks with Taylor who badmouths Alex but Alex has no way of finding this out (No Gossip System) (Low awareness and social believability)

Version Two: The player speaks with Taylor who badmouths Alex and Alex instantly finds out (Global Gossip System) (High awareness and low social believability)

Version Three: If Taylor badmouths Alex to the player while Max is nearby, Max will share this information next time they see Alex (Basic Local Gossip System) (High awareness and high social believability)

From here I will begin having a few people try the different versions and see if they find version three to yield higher believability of Alex on the aspects of Awareness and Social. Below, you can find a collection of screen shots from the current white box prototype.

Images from Project Conversation Prototype One

Independent Studies

Gaydar

Last semester, Rae and I developed a prototype for a dating simulator exploring the trans dating experience on dating apps. We aimed to create a game that would be able to increase feelings of acceptance towards trans communities through playing through the game. However, due to our work leading us towards other projects we never had a chance to get IRB approval and design / conduct a study with the game. But fortunately, one of the professors, Dr. Fox, saw the game at an open house last semester and agreed to meet with me to discuss.

Through our meeting, Dr. Fox was able to introduce me to several ideas on experimental design. Together, we talked about how for Gaydar, it would be beneficial to a study where participants would be randomly assigned between two conditions, the control condition where the game excludes mention of the protagonist being trans, and the experimental condition where the game includes mention of the protagonist being trans. Afterwards, using previously developed methods we would analyze the user's views of trans communities to see if the experimental condition resulted in a significant effect size on acceptance towards trans communities. 

The next steps for the project will be to begin flushing out the study design to capture all the steps needed to have it be conducted. From there we will then create recruitment materials before returning to Dr. Fox to create the IRB.

Believability

For this week, I began conducting research into what are the current metrics being used for analyzing an NPCs believability in games. Through doing so, I identified two papers, Barreto et al. (2017) and Gomes et al. (2013), that break down two different approaches for analyzing a character's believability. 

In Gomes et al. (2013) the conclusion ended up being a survey that covered Behavior Coherence, Change with Experience, Awareness, Behaviour Understandability, Personality, Social, Emotional Expressiveness, Visual Impact, Predictability. Overall, I found this to be a good breakdown of the important factors regarding believability, but is in need of both being flushed out, verified, and then potentially weighted for the importance of the different categories.

Meanwhile for Barreto et al. (2017), they break down how one could approach measuring believability of creatures, living beings that are not humanoids. In addition to traditional believability research, they also look into how biology can be used to analyze believability. They ended up conducting a research study to narrow down from 46 general items to four categories of measurement totalling 26 items. In the end, they found that the main areas of importance were Relation with the Environment, Biological/Social Plausibility and Sociability, Adaptation, and Expression. While their study is not as directly related to my research due to its focus on creatures, the process they used for narrowing down while maintaining internal reliability provides a good roadmap for how I could do a similar process.

The next steps for my research will now be to read through Bogdanovych et al. (2016) since they appear to not only identify areas of importance for believability but use a methodology I hope to learn of assigning weights to the different metrics. From there I will develop a more expanded version of Gomes et al. (2013)’s survey taking inspiration from the various papers and then conducting a study in the style of Barreto et al (2017) to fine tune it.

Joint Thesis

For this week, Rae and I had our first official joint-thesis meeting. We primarily focused on establishing a shared vision of what we want to design while also beginning to create an informal contract that establishes what our expectations are. In the end we decided our focus would be on creating a single larger project comprised of multiple smaller demos that seeks to:

Create a narrative driven game centered around dialogue that uses believable NPCs and gameplay mechanics to increase acceptance towards trans communities.

The next steps will be to finalize the contract and then begin work on creating a series of milestones that we can seek to achieve. Then from there create a project schedule to achieve our goals and establish clarity of what aspects will result in dependencies for us to be aware of.

The Wrap Up

Overall, while I wish I was able to dedicate more time to working on one individual project, since I still have plenty of time left in my thesis its okay for things to be going a little slower while I work on multiple aspects of my research.

Work Cited

Barreto, N., Craveirinha, R., & Roque, L. (2017). Designing a Creature Believability Scale for Videogames. In N. Munekata, I. Kunita, & J. Hoshino (Eds.), Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2017 (Vol. 10507, pp. 257–269). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66715-7_28

Bogdanovych, A., Trescak, T., & Simoff, S. (2016). What makes virtual agents believable? Connection Science, 28(1), 83–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540091.2015.1130021

Gomes, P., Paiva, A., Martinho, C., & Jhala, A. (2013). Metrics for Character Believability in Interactive Narrative. In H. Koenitz, T. I. Sezen, G. Ferri, M. Haahr, D. Sezen, & G. C̨atak (Eds.), Interactive Storytelling (Vol. 8230, pp. 223–228). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02756-2_27