Understanding Player Pathing Choices Through the Use of Sound
By: James Bowling

As technology progresses, sound increasingly becomes a factor in the game environment.  Do current games utilize sound to the fullest extent to provide a wide range of gaming experiences through pathing choices?  The theory behind this project is that level designers can use sound to influence the choices that players make when players choose a path within a level.  This study tests the use of various sounds at decision points within a game.  more >

A Practical Study of the Use of Traps in a Modern 3D Role-Playing Game
By: Rebecca Richards

Traps in video games serve an important purpose in providing environmental hazards in level design.  While traps can increase tension in the level, some players still report loathing traps.  This study examines the use of traps throughout gaming history, singling out three specific games for close study.  The literature review also observes how previous research into surprise and difficulty in games can shed some light on how players could also react to traps in a modern 3D role-playing game.  more >

Developing Player Attachment to Artificial Intelligence Companion Characters
By: Chris McCrimmons

Artificial intelligence companions in video games can provide a great emotional anchor point for immersing a player in the game’s narrative. Well-developed companions give players someone to emphasize with, someone to share in the experience of saving the world (or destroying it, depending on the game). Companions aid immersion in the narrative by enhancing the reality of the game; they complete the illusion of a living, thinking person that players directly affect through their actions. more >

Appealing to Female Gamers in First Person Shooter Level Design
By: Jared Merback

This thesis explores research done on gendered preferences of female gamers, by testing gendered preferences and design practices such as Avatar Selection, Puzzles, Hot Spot gameplay, Realism in Locations and Situations, Failure Repercussions, Engaging Story and NPCs, Indirect Competition, and Cooperation in custom-made levels of the First Person Shooter Left 4 Dead. more >

Narrative Content Conveyed Through Environmental Storytelling Techniques
By: John Bevis

Many games have a story to tell, and designers employ a vast array of techniques for conveying narrative information in games.  This study focuses specifically on ways to tell a game’s story through its environments.  More specifically, this study examines what players consistently perceive and consistently miss while navigating a game environment. more >

A Timing Problem: What Effect Does a Timer have on the Perceptions of Gamers in Recollection of Play Experiences?
By: Kenneth Dilks

Player experiences drive modern level design in many ways. Designers focus on the elements that players see, hear, and interact with. Using age-old adage “Show Me, Don’t Tell Me,” modern designs infuse their game spaces with specifically crafted and placed narrative content, such as objects, sounds, and lighting. These elements allow the player to infer story instead of being told story. more >

Real World Wayfinding Methodologies Applied to Level Design
By: Chasen Herriott

Wayfinding focuses in on three key pieces of information: where a person is in a building or environment, where their desired location lies, and the navigation of distance between the two.  In architecture and construction, where planning and constructing large complex spaces requires significant resources, understanding wayfinding and incorporating it into the design is a crucial element of a successful project.  more >

Bridging Communication: Guiding Complex Decisions through Environment Feedback
By: Richard Milner

As video game mechanics and game objectives have grown increasingly complex, developers have incorporated numerous methods of instruction into games, such as off-screen guides, AI partners, in-game tutorials, and journal entries accessed through menus. However, it continues to fall on designers to develop less and less intrusive of methods of communication to keep players playing as often as possible. more >

Do Players Explore Optional Areas When Given Incentives in a Traditionally Linear Shooter?
By: Robbie Stevens

Do players need incentives to explore optional areas? Or, if given the option do players explore without guidance? Are players capable of welcoming new design methods in a familiar game series? This Master’s Thesis investigates these questions and asks whether incentives inherently make players explore optional areas in a traditionally linear game. more >

The Effect of an AI Guide on Player Exploration
By: Justin Nesbit

An AI guide is a computer-controlled character that guides players through a game world.  This study examined the effect that the presence of an AI guide has on a player’s willingness to explore the game world.  To quantify this effect, 21 participants played a linear level in Gears of War featuring several side areas and alternative paths that players could find through exploration.  more >

Cutscenes, Gameplay, and Perceived Player Immersion
By: Evan Skarin

This thesis presents an exploration of the role cut-scenes in video games in relation to player immersion.  This study presents the sensory, challenge, and imaginative immersion model (SCI model), as developed by Ermi & Mayra (2005), to create a measure to assess how immersed players are while watching a cut-scene in an Elder Scrolls Oblivion level (with three experimental conditions) and measure the effect of this cut-scene on immersion and player enjoyment.  more >

Causing Fear and Anxiety Through Sound Design in Video Games
By: Ahmed Abdel-Meguid

This project researched and tested how to cause fear and anxiety through sound design in video games. The project made the distinction between fear and anxiety and explored how the two emotions are linked while explaining how to effectively evoke those emotions using sound design. By selecting and designing sounds using Freud’s Id, Ego, and Superego theory as a baseline for human psyche, this project tested the use of volume, timing, and source in causing fear and anxiety in players. more >

How Level Designers Affect Player Pathing Decisions: Player Manipulation through Level Design
By: Brandi Alotto

Have current games become so realistic that a level designer’s greatest asset is human psychology and knowing why humans do what they do?  As games become more realistic, how players move around in the game world no longer represents how players have traditionally moved around in the virtual world, but rather represents how humans interact with the real world. more >

Can Great Graphics Overcome Mediocre Gameplay?
By: Susan Arnold

This thesis studies the importance of visual design in video games.  Gameplay is often pushed in front of graphics as being the most important part of a game: the definition of a game’s success or failure.  This study looks at first-person-shooter (FPS) players’ opinions on two maps with polar differences in visual and gameplay qualities to find what gamers see as more important.  more >

Balancing Cut Scenes and Gameplay
By: Eric Bakutis

This thesis examines methods for videogames to tell complex stories to players. This thesis examines the two most common storytelling approaches in today’s games, cut scenes and scripted sequences, and details the benefits and drawbacks of each. This thesis tests a large pool of testers to play two versions of the same story, one told through cut scenes, the other told through scripted sequences, and then draws conclusions about the best ways to use both storytelling approaches in today’s games.  more >

The Effects of Adding Stealth Gameplay to the Level Building Process of an Action Game
By: Steve Baroski

As video games increase in popularity and in quantity, there is a somewhat natural progression towards the mixing of various genres. Action games seem to be the most viable platform for this genre-mixing; Role Playing Game-style stat-boosting, puzzle-based or sports-based mini-games, platforming-style jumping puzzles, have all managed to seep into various action games, often in a hope to provide some variance to the gameplay experience. more >

The Hero and the Prize: Mythic Structure and Narrative Incarnation in Quest Design
By: Joshua Black

This thesis approaches the problem of creating entertaining and compelling quest design in digital games.  Researchers and designers have both advised that quests should allow players to incarnate the game's narrative.  This project implements this advice with a quest/level for the computer game Half-Life 2. more>

Manifestations of Conflict in Games: Stealth versus Action
By: Daniel Brennan

For years, video games have relied heavily on combat as the central form of conflict. Since Castle Wolfenstein (Muse Software 1981), stealth has developed into a potential alternative to action. While research suggests that industry faith in stealth as a stand-alone source of conflict appears minimal, the Thief series (Looking Glass Studios 1998-2000, Ion Storm Inc. 2004) in particular offers hope that it is achievable under the right conditions.  more >

The Influence of Laterality on Player Choice and Pathing
By: William Tyler Buser

In order to design meaningful and compelling experiences level designers must understand the interests and desires of their audiences. Providing choices within games and their environments are important in order to provide players with a sense of control, and it is just as important to try to understand and foresee those choices. This project examines the possibility of innate subconscious motivations for player choice, specifically player movement and pathing choices. It studies whether laterality, i.e., handedness, influences the preference individuals’ exhibit for the paths or routes they choose in games.  more >

Effect of Success versus Other Players on the Perception of Fun
By: Charles Butler

Fun can be a very difficult topic to nail down since everyone seems to have a different idea about what fun is and is not.  Fun is very desirable in nearly all commercial games, but defining it and actually getting it into a game can prove difficult.  Developers have included multiplayer features into their games since the beginning of the industry in an attempt to create fun, but to what extent does this actually affect a player’s perception of a game’s fun? more>

Gender-Related Gaming Considerations: A Practical Exploration
By: Jennifer Canada

As games become a more widespread cultural pastime, many developers and publishers are targeting previously underserved demographics in an effort to increase both their sales numbers and their overall saturation in the entertainment marketplace. One such underserved category is females, who have long been marginalized or outright ignored as potential consumers of video games. more>

Do Players Explore Off the Critical Path when given Specific Linear Objectives?
By: Jason Cates

Most games have a critical path, or a direct path that leads the player directly to the game or objective’s conclusion.  Many games also include non-critical paths, which serve to enhance the game by giving the player special rewards and new experiences.  This thesis looks at non-critical paths, and their importance in relation to specific linear objectives.  more >

Techniques to Create Non-Linear Gameplay within Confined Playspaces
By: Steven Chew

Games offer players interactivity: the opportunity to participate in game events and affect the overall experience based on their choices and decisions. This thesis introduces techniques to create non-linear gameplay within confined playspaces by reusing game assets and creative gameplay scripting. more >

Level Legibility: A Practical Exploration of Techniques to Improve Player Wayfinding
By: Jane Chung

As video game developers progress towards creating more open, non-linear game-worlds, the demand on the player to understand his avatar’s location increases. In non-linear worlds, such those found in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs) and sandbox games, the environmental layout offers players a variety of navigational choices. more >

Character Interaction Gameplay: An Analysis of Form and Function
By: Brent Ellison

Ever since Joseph Weizenbaum created the artificial therapist, ELIZA, in 1966, designers of interactive entertainment have attempted to incorporate meaningful interactions with virtual characters to aid immersion. However, while a great deal has been written about the process of creating game characters and writing for games, very little literature has addressed the mechanics of character interaction in games. more >

An Evaluation of Realistic Animal Behavior in Video Games
By: David Elkin

Video games are becoming ever more realistic and complex.  Not only are computer controlled opponents reacting more intelligently to player actions, but characters in the background also react to each other to create the appearance of a living virtual world.  Do these details truly make a video game more immersive and fun? more >

Emergent Cooperative Gameplay
By: Elizabeth England

This thesis attempts to reconcile the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma with a game whose primary purpose is entertainment in an effort to reproduce a gradual trend from competitive gameplay to cooperative.  It involves the creation of a 2D game to provide a ground to implement the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and collecting data from play testers to track their choices.  more >

Choices in Video Game Quest Structure
By: Svea Eppler

This thesis explores alternatives to the common standard of quest structure and progression in modern role play video games. Research implies that many games today rely on a similar and systematic style of quest progression that creates a similarity in player choice and a lack of dynamic gameplay during quest progression.  more >

The Right Way is the Wrong Way: Dead End Theory in Level Design
By: Robert Gee

This project examines the application and use of dead-ends for practical level design.  Additionally it looks at several reward systems associated with dead-end areas and the effectiveness at different level design techniques to lead players into certain areas.  This thesis includes a test level created using the Hammer editor in Half-Life 2: Episode 2.
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Creating Meaningful Choices in Single Player First Person Shooter Levels with Modifiable Spaces
By: Andres Gonzales

This thesis proposes a design technique for introducing meaningful choice in single player FPS maps with the intent of enhancing the level of immersion. This method involves the integration of alternate paths within a single player FPS environment giving players meaningful choices. The intent is to help enhance the experience found in games that tend to rely solely on realism to create immersion. more >

Can Cognitive Puzzle-Centric Game Play Captivate a First Person Shooter Audience?
By: Jonathan Hemingway

This thesis provides research data supporting the idea that cognitive puzzle game play can captivate the first person shooter audience.  It also provides data that helps distinguish what attributes of cognitive puzzles are enjoyed by the FPS audience and which are detrimental to their overall experience.   more >

The Invisible Hand: Using Level Design Elements to Manipulate Player Choice
By: Thomas Hoeg

One of the key tasks of a level designer is to manage “level flow,” the path that the player takes through the level. A good level subtly leads the player and makes the world feel larger than it really is. more >

Techniques of Balancing Two-Flag, Asymmetrical Capture the Flag Levels
By: Travis Hoffstetter

Typical capture the flag maps use a symmetrical layout to provide balance.  This leaves a wealth of opportunity to create asymmetrical maps and expand the genre.  However, a set of techniques for creating balanced asymmetrical maps does not yet exist.  Debates over the viability of asymmetrical CTF maps persist throughout the industry.  more >

Riding without Training Wheels: Communicating Objectives Using Implicit Communication Techniques
By: Robert Howard

Modern video games have increasingly relied on explicit communication techniques to explain objectives to the player. This communication most often takes the form of on-screen text.  more >

Trading Camera for Controller: The Use and Effectiveness of Cinematic Techniques in In-Game Machinima Style Cut-Scenes
By: Ryan Jenkins

With the advent of modern technology, video games have become more story-driven, and often times contain longer and more elaborate cut-scenes than in the past.  Consequently, developers have questioned the need for film techniques in cut-scenes.  Should designers adhere to the strict rules of filming and editing when working on a game? more >

Character Advancement in the First-Person Shooter Genre
By: Hans Larsen

As the video game industry continues to mature, the demand for games with more depth increases. One way in which to meet this demand has been to use mechanics from other genres to add to the depth of the genre in which the developer is creating a game. Another method used is to create a hybrid genre for the game. more >

Procedural Back-Story Generation in the Framework of a Murder Mystery
By: Jeff Lininger

Procedural generation, the use of algorithms to generate content at run-time instead of using pre-generated content created by a developer, is not a new technique in the game industry. However, the current state of procedural generation in the game industry has left one area relatively untouched: narrative. more >

Smooth, Artistic Transitions between Highly Contrasting Environments
By: Timothy Locke

This thesis project examines two methods used in video games to transition between drastically different outdoor environments.  This project presents two variations of a dense jungle environment that transition into an arid desert canyon environment utilizing the technique of transitional asset placement and terrain textural blending.   more>

Environmental Storytelling as a Primary Narrative Technique
By: Rachel Maille

This thesis explores the effectiveness of using a game’s environment to imply narrative.  Games are an interactive media, and it is the designer’s role to provide those interactions while reducing or eliminating non-interactive elements.  For story-centered games, the designer must carefully balance the need to present goals and critical story elements with the player’s need to stay in constant control.  more >

Effectual Learning of Physics as a Means of Entertainment within Interactive Media
By: Kris McMahan

This project focuses solely on players’ ability to learn core physics concepts effectively within the realm of console and personal computer games (henceforth referred to as “games”) as well as the resulting effects that players experience from this style of learning in relation to more widely accepted learning styles such as audio-visual learning and memorization.  more >

Graphics vs. Gameplay: Multiplayer Games
By: Benjamin McArdle

As graphics improve, they become an even more integral and essential element of today’s games. When developers combine an appealing aesthetic experience with the social experience found in today’s standard multiplayer games (Capture the Flag, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch), the past has shown that the outcome is virtually always success. more >

Using Artificial Intelligence to Enable Dynamic Gameplay
By: Richard Porter

This thesis investigated the viability of using artificial intelligence to enable dynamic gameplay. Dynamic gameplay promotes exciting, challenging, non-repetitive player experiences. Artificial intelligence represents a powerful but complex tool for delivering these types of experiences. This project implemented an example of how to use this tool and evaluated its effectiveness.  more >

The Importance of Story in Single Player First Person Shooters
By: Clancy Powell

This project analyzes the impacts of narrative in the first person shooter genre as it applies to single player games.    By analyzing existing literature on videogame narrative as well as single player first person shooter titles over the last 15 years, it is clear that story has become integral into the newer titles and suggest that story gives the player a sense of purpose, a sense of place, and motivation to keep playing.  more >

The Effectiveness of the Illusion of Choice
By: David Gerald Saunders

As technology grows and game systems become more complex, the ability for players to meaningfully determine the direction of story and player progression becomes ever more sought after.  However, this freedom comes at a cost – every new player choice requires additional art assets, voice recordings, or other forms of expensive manpower.  The Illusion of Choice gives designers a way to create the impression of large, complex worlds, without the huge cost of doing so. more >

Techniques and Methods to Design and Balance Asymmetrical Bases in Team Fortress 2 Capture the Flag Levels
By: Christian Schmidt

Classic capture the flag map design relies on symmetry in order to inherently balance both sides of the map. Both bases have identical designs ensuring no side has an advantage. Although asymmetrical designs can be balanced, it is considered more difficult and time consuming that simply relying on symmetrical designs. more >

How Players Learn: Evaluating Interjected and Contextual Education in Interactive Entertainment
By: Tanya Short

This thesis studies the education of players in video games. Facts and data are often presented separately from gameplay in educational games, but might players learn more effectively from a seamless integration? This study looks at adult and child gamers’ opinions on two games with different methods of presenting data to find which encourages better data retention and/or a better play experience.   more >

The Effect of Time Limits on Player Willingness to Explore Non-Critical Areas
By: Shane Slama

Time is a constant factor in human life. Every person makes decisions based on how much time is needed to complete a task. The calculation of these decisions varies depending on a person’s familiarity with the topic, awareness of the remaining time, individual personality or profile, experience with risk assessment, and even the like or dislike of being in a time-sensitive scenario.  more >

The Imperative Nature of Communication and Understanding through Geometric Form within Virtual Environments
By: Brandon Souders

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the communication between players and the surrounding environment.  Within virtual environments basic geometric forms provide the basis for this communication.  A solid understanding of the potential of this communication helps to provide spaces that are more easily understood by players. more >

The Second Player's Dilemma
By: Jeff Touchstone

This Thesis explores the subject of how game developers can create meaningful choices for players in a cooperative mode given a single player framework. By creating a Half-Life 2 level with branching paths, multiple purpose spaces, and dilemma puzzles. A dilemma puzzle is problem involving two players that has no obvious solution and often something is lost and gained regardless of the decision. more >

Expanding the Definition of Landmarks In Level Design
By: David C Vargo

Landmarks are an important part of understanding a place in time and space.  They help guide people along paths and enhance memorable experiences along that journey.  When game designers have used landmarks in the past, they have typically understood them in an abstract manner.  Devoid of context, designers think of them in the standard definition as a tall vertical structure dominating its surroundings.  more >

The Effects of Music on Gameplay and Immersion
By: Armando Villarreal III

This thesis examines what kind of effects music can have in videogames. A videogame designer’s job involves creating the best gameplay possible for players. Music provides one method for designers to help immerse players in the gameplay experience.  more >

Evoking Fear Through Level Design
By: Matt Wilkinson

Level Designers continually strive to immerse their players in the game they are playing. The best way to immerse a player is to evoke emotions in them through the game, and few emotions are more powerful than fear. By using a variety of “scare” methods to evoke fear in the players, this thesis hopes to improve a level designer’s ability to frighten their players. more >

Evoking Urgency through Level Design
By: Hunter Wright

As a level designer, designing a level to create a specific emotion is a valuable skill, and is applicable to almost any genre of game. This project studied methods to evoke a sense of urgency in the player, and what causes them to move through an area the fastest. This thesis focuses on the effect that game entities have on this sense of urgency. more >