Project links
Overview
The title of my Master's thesis is "Emergent Gameplay and the Affordance of Features in Open World Game Environments".
This is a project that I did in collaboration with Ubisoft Stockholm. In this research, we would like to see how affordance theory, a theory that is more commonly used in Human-Computer Interaction field, can be used to influence emergent gameplay in open-world environments. Emergent gameplay is the interaction that are performed by players or in-game entities using game mechanics as tools for gameplay to create properties that cannot be attained without such interaction.
An example of emergent gameplay is the flying machine phenomenon in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where players can stack two metallic objects and stand on top of them to fly by controlling the bottom metallic object.
Affordance is the interaction relationship between an actor and its environment. It explains how an actor interacts with the environment around them based on the placement and the shape of the environment, along with the interaction possibilities of the actor. Because of this nature, we believe that affordance theory can be used to influence the occurrence of emergent gameplay.
While it is clear how players or other entities interact with the game mechanics to create emergent gameplay, the role of the environment on the occurrence of emergent gameplay remains unclear. This becomes the research question:
In open-world games, to what extent does the occurrence of emergent gameplay increases, due to the impact of the affordance of the environment, as measured by how the players utilize and interact with the environment and how the environment impacts the players’ behavior?
Interaction
Method
To answer the research question, we developed a small open-world game that is able to collect the players' interaction data. The game was developed in Unity 3D over the span of one month. We collected 23 participants where they had to play the game first, and then interviewed afterwards.
We analyzed the players' interview records using thematic analysis. The result from the thematic analysis is then complimented with the visualization of the interaction data. Through this approach, we managed to collect the players' reasoning on why they take or abandon certain paths through the thematic analysis, while the visualization of the interaction data managed to display how the players actually use the environment.
Here is a snippet on how the visualization looks like:
Results
There are five major findings from this study: how affordance affects emergent gameplay, players' impression on different types of affordance, how players utilize the mechanics, the emergence of playstyles and strategies, and consistency and rules.
Firstly, emergent gameplay occurs when the environment does not present any hints or signifiers on how to interact with, i.e., when the affordance is hidden, uniformized, or falsely perceived. However, players tend to be more frustrated when the affordance is falsely perceived. Players will appreciate hidden or uniformized affordance more, noting that discovering those affordance increases their satisfaction.
Next, players learn how to interact with the mechanics first before they learn about the environment. They then use the environment as an extension of their interaction space when players have no ability to interact with the environment directly.
When players feel comfortable with the interaction possibilities within the game, they tend to form playstyles or strategies to solve the problems, and they will stick with the strategy until they find a better one. Finally, having a consistent rules that governs the game is essential for player satisfaction, allowing players to recreate their previous approaches.