Sasha Soraine

Emergent Narratives (ENs) provide a rich tool for uncovering untold tales when we play video games. They are stories that are not embedded by the game’s author, instead arising from the game’s mechanics (Adams, 2013). This enables the game to create new events for the player to experience, generated from the player’s choices (Louchart et al 2008). ENs, therefore, are...

Games are made up of different kinds of experience; game designers are experience designers for players. We are specifically interested in the mechanical experiences of players interacting with challenges.

We look at players’ mechanical experience of gameplay challenges. We consider mechanical experience as fundamental design knowledge: designers need to analyze the challenges hey craft to understand the skills necessary from their players for success. One application of this study is to explain why some challenges may be inaccessible to certain players. There is currently no comprehensive framework for describing...

We explore the relationship between a player’s cognitive and motor abilities, and the abilities necessary for completing specific challenges. Existing engineering-focused work does not treat the player on the same footing as the game. We view (the mechanical part of) games as a system of systems composed of the game mechanics (including challenges), and the player via their cognitive and...

We are interested in a systematic understanding the effect of visual scaling — changing the size of the screen, while holding other factors constants — on gameplay. Through examples, we illustrate the effects that arise. We investigate scaling up as well as down, and find that the effects are quite different. We give a first classification of the underlying causes...

Video games as a system are composed of two component systems: the player and the game. The interaction between these two create specific gameplay experiences which can be described mechanically by player actions and gameplay challenges. We systematically look at potential player actions (as defined by basic cognitive and motor abilities) and gameplay challenges to understand how they relate to...