'That Darned Sandstorm': A Study of Procedural Generation through Archaeological Storytelling
This addresses the problem of limited narrative integration in procedural generation for game designers and researchers, though it appears incremental as a preliminary study.
The paper tackled the understudied narrative affordances of procedurally generated game environments by developing a generative archaeology game to prompt player interpretation, reporting on a survey of 187 participants and analyzing both intentional design effects and an unintentional glitch.
Procedural content generation has been applied to many domains, especially level design, but the narrative affordances of generated game environments are comparatively understudied. In this paper we present our first attempt to study these effects through the lens of what we call a generative archaeology game that prompts the player to archaeologically interpret the generated content of the game world. We report on a survey that gathered qualitative and quantitative data on the experiences of 187 participants playing the game Nothing Beside Remains. We provide some preliminary analysis of our intentional attempt to prompt player interpretation, and the unintentional effects of a glitch on the player experience of the game.