Character Driven Game Design

Article 4 133
Gameplay Design Patterns for
Social Networks and Conflicts
Petri Lankoski & Staffan Björk
Abstract
This paper explores how games can be designed to make the
social networks of characters as part of the gameplay. We start
with a premise that game characters and social relations between
them are import in games. We examine several games and derive
gameplay design patterns from those games. Models from
social network analysis, actor-network theory and Egri’s model
for dramatic conflict is used to focus the analysis. In addition to
isolating design patterns from existing features of the games, we
look situations where game structures do not support social networks
or conflicts as proposed in above-mentioned theories. Patterns
identified include Competing for Attention, Gain Allies, Social
Dilemma, Internal Conflict, and Social Maintenance.
Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.8.0 [Personal Computing]:
General – Games.
General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Theory.
Keywords: Gameplay Design Patterns, Gameplay, Narration,
Non-player Character, Computer Games, Gameplay Design
Introduction
As social creatures, humans easier to engage in a game and narration
when characters portrayed in these have social relations to each other,
or in other words that the relations between characters form a social
network. This is common knowledge within scriptwriting theories for
theatre and film (see, e.g., [6, 7, 17, 19]), and these theories are also
applied to creating games. However, social relations in games are typically
part of the storyline (see, e.g., Thief II: The Metal Age [34], Dead or
Alive 3 [44], Silent Hill 3 [45], and Half-Life [48]) and games typically do
not let players directly act to influences those relations, instead letting
them be consequences of other (most commonly physical) actions that
are shown through cut-scenes. One example of this can be found in
Quake 4 [22] where the relation between the player character, Matthew
Kane, and the other characters in the Rhino squad are only changed
in the cut scenes. No possibilities to do so are available during gameplay,
including making it impossible for the player to terminating the
relationship by killing the other team members. When players are given
direct choices to influence the relationship this is typically done as
explicit choices between a limited set of alternatives, and the effects
of these are localized and seldom have the complexity of nuances of