Understanding the Congruence Between Player and Character Beliefs in Digital Games

Game researchers and designers both know that a key element of making a game enjoyable is for the player to identify with the game's protagonist. A large majority of research focuses on studying how the physical appearance of the protagonist influences player identification. We propose that elements of the character's personality are equally, if not more, important when creating bonds between player and protagonist. When approaching protagonist design, there is a trade-off between character depth and identification. In order to have more engaging and deep protagonists, certain subsets of players will not identify with the protagonist due to conflicting beliefs and values. On the other hand, game designers can make characters shallow and generic to avoid isolating players, but this leads to a less interesting narrative experience. One solution to this problem is to tailor the beliefs and values exhibited by the protagonist to align with those of each individual player. In order to achieve this, however, the game needs to have a way of knowing the real-world beliefs of the player. This can be accomplished through validated questionnaires, but this is not ideal for players who are playing a game for enjoyment. In this work we address the problem that we don't have validated methods of measuring real-world beliefs of the player through game mechanics and make the following main contributions: 1. Understand how a congruence (and incongruence) of beliefs between the player and protagonist relates to identification and enjoyment 2. Create and test the effectiveness of using text-based narrative prototypes to evaluate narrative elements of games 3. Develop and evaluate a method of using a player's in-game dialogue choices to construct a behaviour model of the player 4. Demonstrate that in-game dialogue choices can be used to accurately measure the player's real-world belief