Game Plot Design with an LLM-powered Assistant: An Empirical Study with Game Designers
This addresses the challenge of narrative design for game designers, though it is incremental in showing both benefits and limitations of LLM assistance.
The researchers developed GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant to help game designers create and test narratives for turn-based games, finding in a study with 14 designers that it led to high satisfaction and ownership but also confirmed LLMs' limitations in generating complex, innovative content.
We introduce GamePlot, an LLM-powered assistant that supports game designers in crafting immersive narratives for turn-based games, and allows them to test these games through a collaborative game play and refine the plot throughout the process. Our user study with 14 game designers shows high levels of both satisfaction with the generated game plots and sense of ownership over the narratives, but also reconfirms that LLM are limited in their ability to generate complex and truly innovative content. We also show that diverse user populations have different expectations from AI assistants, and encourage researchers to study how tailoring assistants to diverse user groups could potentially lead to increased job satisfaction and greater creativity and innovation over time.