This talk discusses how components in a game world, from both a systemic design perspective, and from an actual content perspective, can carry meaning relevant to individual players. The discussion is grounded in work with a massively multi player online (MMO) prototype where players in guided play-tests created their own opponents that they battled in groups of three. The opponents are called Manifestations, and can be compared to the “boss monsters” that in adventureand role-plying games pose the greatest challenges in terms of tactical game play, or battle. When creating Manifestations players define how these shall behave in play, and what they say under different circumstances. The game play mechanics in the world is centered on emotions and social relations. One of the design goals in the creation of the prototype was to cater for a system wheretactical game play can be closely tied to the potential narrative contents. The Manifestations players created in the play tests were of four main categories; reflections of persons they had complicated relationships to in real life, difficult situations, abstract concepts, or purely fictional entities. In several cases players brought material into the game that had personal meaning to them. These meanings were developed further when players saw how their Manifestation behaved within the rule system of the world. For example, one player created a Manifestation of an anticipated exam, while another made a Manifestation called “Mother”. The Mother cast spells called “Focused Aggression” and “Cold Ripple of Fear”. It was able to perform acts called “Blame”, ”Threaten”, and “Disagree”. The group experimented with tactical choices, while reasoning about the Mother’s potential motivations. They managed to overcome the Mother by alternating between giving each other resistance and casting spells, the winning stroke being a rapid series of spells called “Forgive”. The talk was given at ITU in Copenhagen April 24, 2012 in the Game Lecture series. http://game.itu.dk/index.php/Game_Lectures

1. Players Imbuing Meaning:
Co-creation of Challenges in a
prototype MMO
ITU April 2012
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari
University of Malta

3. About me
My last decade:
where my body was: Where my mind was: What I took part in
now: 2012 ->University of building:
Now: Co-creation
Malta
Next: MANIFEST
2010 -11 Gotland University + AI Based Game design,
UCSC prototyping methods The Pataphysic Institue
PhD work done at Gotland Game Mechanics for Mind Music
University, (Sweden), construction
through Teesside
World of Minds
University (UK). Visiting Semi-autonomous Avatars
Scholar at Tokyo Tech,
The Garden of Earthly
Georgia Tech and UCSC. Avatars in game worlds Delights
(2004/9) Avatars
Tech lead at Zero Game Oroborous
Studio, Interactive MMO architectures for
Institute (2002/3) character driven drama Commedia dell’Arte
Lead Game Programmer, Object oriented story The diamond Mystery in
Liquid Media (2001) construction Rosemond Valley

4. Common problems in persistent
multiplayer game worlds

5. Common problems in persistent
multiplayer game worlds
Overall narrative in game
world is not engaging
individual players. Not
meaningful.
Game mechanics and
narrative content appear
disjoint

6. Common problems in persistent
multiplayer game worlds
Ambition
Overall narrative in game
world is not engaging Individual meaning for players –
individual players. Not content that is meaningful for
meaningful. individuals and small temporary
groups.
Game mechanics and So close ties between diegetic
narrative content appear content and systemic structure
disjoint of game world, that in play, they
are not perceived as separate.

11. Co-creation
In management and advertising research:
Added value
In pedagogy: enhanced learning
In MMO research (wow) – add-ons,
developer integrating good ideas into
regular interface.
Here: Players creating actants, entities
that can act within a multiplayer game
world.
CO: players + system
The system providing the affordances given for creating
instances that may act within the system
(In the tradition of text based virtual game worlds, MUDs, and
later graphical ones, allowing different levels of co creation
to players. Adding own graphics, animation, audio,
scripting of dialog and behavior. Sliding scale of how
persistent the player-created content is, and various
methods of editorial control.)

12. Boss Fight, start at 0:48

13. The Prototype

14. Pataphysic Institute
Basic Game Play
• Players need to defeat physical manifestations of negative
mental states by using
• Spells
• Affective actions
• The spells available to characters depends on their
personality and current mood.
• The affective actions available to a character depend on
the current mood.

15. How players describe it*
(Not how I describe it. My description is bound to contain design intentions, and perhaps not
represent what is actually there.)
“In the game you use the characters feelings to cast spells, depending on how
you feel, different spells become available to you. you can affect how
others feel by performing actions such as hugging joking or insulting. long
term playing creates relationships between characters so that the mere
presence of another character affects you.” (Player with test id 16)
“The point of the game is to control the moodswings of your character. The
world is full of the manifestations of different feelings and mindsets and
only by interacting with them/your friends can you "get in the right mood"
to counter them. Actions are things like "hold hand" which would counter
a "fear/terror" abomination.” (Player with test id 26)
* When asked, after play-testing: “Picture that you are talking to a friend. Describe how this game is
played.”

16. Spreading Activation Network
of Affect nodes
Mind Module Semiautonomous agent
architecture.
Personality Trait -> Emotion Emotion -> Mood
Personality traits affect how strongly characters feel emotions. Emotions affect characters’ mood.

18. The Pataphysic Institute

19. Character Creation
Big Five (OCEAN, FFM)
assessed using IPIP
NEO

21. Mind Module Info

22. Affective Actions

23. Affective actions
Iterations of the AA feature.

24. Avatars,NPCs, Single
Sentiment Manifestations, and
Entities: Compound manifestations

26. Mind Magic Spells

27. Mind Magic Spells

28. Curses and Blessings
• Avatars can be affected by the spells Sentiment
Curse and Sentiment Blessing.
• Sentiment Curse gives an avatar a strong
negative sentiment that has a zero decay rate.
• Example: curse of Guilt.
The way to get rid of this sentiment is to
create a manifestation of the sentiment, a
compound manifestation (CM). If the CM is
vanquished, the sentiment disappears.

29. Player created CM

30. Play Test

31. Play testing
Film
Camera
Player 1
1
(Object of
Game
Desire)
Master
Player 2 Player
3
In Clients:
-Log files of play (one file for each
avatar) Film
Camtasia recordings of: Camera 2
-voice (microphone in headset),
-Face (webcam),
- Actions (taping of screen)

32. Play testing
Player 1
(Object of
Game
Desire)
Master
Player 2 Player
3

34. Plat test scale and scope
• Multi-player tests – 3 players + 1 game
master
• 3 scenarios:
1. use AA’s according to roles in a group
2. learn to use spells towards
manifestations
3. Player’s authoring of manifestation.
Cooperate in group to overcome them.

35. Participants
• 25 participants
• 19 – 38 years of age with a mean of
23.44
• 15 male, 10 female participants

36. Scenario 1-AAs
Scenario: Two avatars competing for the affections of the third
GM asked players to picture a situation where two of them
(Player 1 and 2) had played together for a while, and that
the third (Player 1) was new to them,

38. 2. Learning spells Defeating
manifestations
Scenario 2: GM takes group to area with negative
single sentiment manifestations.
Goal: cooperate to overcome them, and learn own
special personality spells.

40. Scenario 3: player authored foes
GM ask player to curse each other. Cursed player manifests the
emotion they cursed with. Players’ goals: deafeat the foe using
grouped indivuals’ spells. Use AAs to affect each others moods
needed to defeat foe.

42. Why talk about co-creation?
When designing the test and the test scenarios I aimed to
gather data on:
• Sentiments (relationships whose values are based in
previous interactions)
• Semi Autonomy – players’ attitude to the control of the
avatar
• Mood – the summary of the avatars state of mind
based on events, controlling the avatars action
potential
• Role-playing aspects
• Co creation of Manifestations – the main challenge in
the play test. This was the most engaging part of
the game playing in the test.

43. What was created
The Manifestations players created in the play tests
were of four main categories;
• Persons, named according to real-life role (for
player), (ex. “mother”)
• difficult situations, (ex “an exam”)
• abstract concepts, (ex “blue”) or
• fictional entities. (“Goblin of Doom”)
In several cases players brought material into the game that had personal
meaning to them. These meanings were developed further when
players saw how their manifestation behaved within the rule system of
the world

50. Players’ descriptions of
their manifestations Their strategies:

51. Creation of meaning, stance in the
player who creates a CM:
1. Player uses authoring interface for creating an actant, a compound
manifestation. (”Mother”)
2. Player observes the behavior of the actant A (Spells and AA’s cast,
and what it says.)
3. Player interacts with other players, forming a strategy for how to
interact with the actant, communicating among each other. Players
did not only theorize about the CMs weaknesses, they also used the
emotions their avatars felt towards each other.
4. Player tells others about actant A after playing. “I created a "mother"
that casted blame, threatened and other depressing spells.”

53. Mental Models
• Of how a mind works.
The ”minds” of the avatars and CMs
work – given the parameters of
personality, emotion and mood.
• MMO combat conventions.
Taking roles and taskdivisions using
concept such as tanking and damage-
dealing
Mental models helping the understanding of
the game mechanics (can also hinder).

55. Intentionality
intentionality*: the player’s observation that an agent is acting
rationally, towards internally held goals.
When players encounter an AI system in a game, they assign
intentionality to that system, “using words whose meanings go
beyond the mathematical structures” **.
They create narratives that rationalize the AI’s actions and reasoning
about the AI’s goals ***.
To me, if a player can read intentionality into a system, or into
components or agents in a system, that is a sign of successful
design.
* Dennet, D. 1987. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press.
**Agre, P.E. 1997. Computation and Human Experience (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational
Perspectives). Cambridge University Press.
*** Sengers, P. 2000. Narrative Intelligence. K. Dautenhahn, ed. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

56. In summary, players
imbuing meaning by
• Authoring,
• observing, interpreting, strategizing –
players in dialog with each other
assigning intentionality to their creations,
• interacting, and
• re-telling

57. Future work

66. QUESTIONS?
Contact: mirjam.eladhari@um.edu.mt
end