Dit proefschrift presenteert twee theoretische kaders voor het ontwerpen van games en beschrijft hoe game designers deze kunnen inzetten om het game ontwerpproces te stroomlijnen. Er bestaan op dit moment meerdere ontwerptheorie¨en voor games, maar geen enkele kan rekenen op een breed draagvlak binnen de game industrie. Vooral academische ontwerptheorie¨en hebben regelmatig een slechte reputatie. Het eerste kader dat game designers inzicht biedt in spelregels en hun werking heet Machinations en maakt gebruik van dynamische, interactieve diagrammen. Het tweede theoretische kader van dit proefschrift, Mission/Space, richt zich op level-ontwerp en spelmechanismen die de voortgang van een speler bepalen. In tegenstelling tot bestaande modellen voor level-ontwerp, bouwt Mission/Space voort op het idee dat er in een level twee verschillende structuren bestaan. Mission-diagrammen worden gebruikt om de structuur van taken en uitdagingen voor de speler te formaliseren, terwijl space-diagrammen de ruimtelijke constructie formaliseren. Beide constructies zijn aan elkaar gerelateerd, maar zijn niet hetzelfde. De verschillende wijzen waarop missies geprojecteerd kunnen worden op een bepaalde ruimte speelt uiteindelijk een belangrijke rol in de totstandkoming van de spelervaring.
In social settings, people often need to reason about unobservablemental content of other people, such as their beliefs, goals, orintentions. This ability helps them to understand, to predict, and evento influence the behavior of others. People can take this ability furtherby applying it recursively. For example, they use second-order theory ofmind to reason about the way others use theory of mind, as in ‘Alicebelieves that Bob does not know about the surprise party’. However,empirical evidence so far suggests that people do not spontaneously usehigher-order theory of mind in strategic games. Previous agent-basedmodeling simulations also suggest that the ability to recursively applytheory of mind may be especially effective in competitive settings. Inthis paper, we use a combination of computational agents and Bayesianmodel selection to determine to what extent people make use of higherordertheory of mind reasoning in a particular competitive game, theMod game, which can be seen as a much larger variant of the well-knownrock-paper-scissors game.We let participants play the competitive Mod game against computationaltheory of mind agents. We find that people adapt their level oftheory of mind to that of their software opponent. Surprisingly, knowinglyplaying against second- and third-order theory of mind agents enticeshuman participants to apply up to fourth-order theory of mindthemselves, thereby improving their results in the Mod game. This phenomenoncontrasts with earlier experiments about other strategic oneshotand sequential games, in which human players only displayed lowerorders of theory of mind.
The use of games as interventions in the domain of health care is of-ten paired with evaluating the effects in randomized clinical trials. The iterative design and development process of games usually also involves an evaluation phase, aimed at identifying improvements for subsequent iterations. Since game design theory and theories from associated fields provide no unified framework for designing successful interventions, interpreting evaluation results and for-mulating improvements is complicated. This case study explores an approach of monitoring design decisions and corresponding theories throughout the design and development cycle, allowing evaluation results to be attributed to design decisions. Such an approach may allow the game design and development pro-cess to iterate the game more efficiently towards use in practice.3rd European Conference on Gaming and Playful Interaction in Health Care.
