Character Driven Game Design

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Character-Driven Game Design
Example of these include N-cliques (groups where all people are connected
to each other by traversing at most N lines), N-clans (N-cliques
where one may only traverse lines to other members of the N-clique
to determine membership), K-plexes (where a member must have connections
to all but K nodes), and K-cores (where every member needs
to have connections to at least K other members). Somewhat less rigorously
defined concepts (see [26] include Singletons (people not participating
in the network), Isolated Communities (groups that are connected
to each other through one central member, creating a ‘star’ shape) and
giant components (well-connected region persisting even when ‘stars’
are removed).
Actor-Network Theory
The network descriptions above typically have individuals as the nodes
in the network, or rather their online profiles for specific applications
such as Facebook [1] and Flickr [2]. However, in an effort to redefine social
science proponents of actor-network theory (ANT) [33] argue that
actors (nodes) in social networks should not only be humans; instead
they are collections of heterogeneous entities consisting of humans, human-tool
combinations, and non humans (e.g., technologies, machines,
or materials). This expansion of actors is the effect of but one of the five
areas of uncertainty ANT proponents argues the social science should
embrace. The five areas regard the nature of groups, actors, actions, science,
and textual accounts.
The ANT approach has been advocated within research on games as
a way of more correctly looking at massively multiplayer online games
[15] Notably, ANT argues that freedom to describe agency, as not only
coming from humans when describing the social phenomena, so curses
and rings can make their bearers perform actions, and love can make
somebody survive ordeals. Thus, the theory supports that a game not
only can explicitly use these abstract concepts in a model of a social
network, but also should do so. Proponents of ANT argue that actors
themselves should primarily do the descriptions of the component of
the networks, or by as faithfully as possible observing these and documenting
how they refer to their social relationships. This provides an
obstacle to applying the theory directly in design processes since the
designers typically want create the actors and the network simultaneously.
Creating the actors first and then letting them create a network
and report a network is a potentially interesting way of automatically
generating social networks, but outside the scope of this paper.
Nevertheless, the actor-network theory can be useful for gameplay
design since it highlights certain concepts and activities. As one
example, goals in a game can be created from the view that groups
are not stable entities in the ANT, but rather something that constantly
needs maintenance, or in other words “if you stop making and remaking
groups, you stop having groups” [33]. Another example, based on