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We present the first experiments from a pilot study with Ruby's Mission, an applied gaming intervention for reducing feelings of loneliness in children with a chronic illness. Based on a previously performed literature study, Ruby's Mission sets out to train specific socioemotional skills, through four children sharing emotional experiences. The present study contributes insights in (1) how asymmetrical player roles in a multiplayer game affect in-game social interactions, and (2) if socioemotional skills affect the in-game social interactions in a multiplayer video game. Experiments were conducted during a public event for introducing children to science. A baseline measure of socioemotional skills was made using the emotional awareness questionnaire (EAQ). Video and audio recordings were made during gameplay, and were annotated afterwards on social interaction. As per expectations, results suggest that asymmetrical player roles encourage different levels of social interaction. Analysing the effect of socioemotional skills on an individual player's in-game social interactions, surprisingly revealed a slight negative effect, where social interactions decreased as socioemotional skills improved. Interestingly, when investigating this effect on per gameplay group level, no interaction was found. Results also reveal that external factors such as parent interference, play environment, and peer relations might have an effect on social interactions as well.

Negative body perception can negatively affect one's health, as it can lead to depression and eating disorders. Body appreciation on the other hand, is about accepting, respecting, loving, and appreciating the body, and has been associated with self-esteem, optimism, life satisfaction, and other factors related to the well-being. The aim of this research project is to investigate whether lower body appreciation can be identified by visualising the discrepancy between someone's actual self and their ideal self (i.e., the distance between these two domains of the self). This discrepancy is visualised through an avatar creation task using The Sims 4 in which participants have to create an avatar of (1) the way they actually look, and (2) their ideal image. Participants' body appreciation was measured using the BAS-2 body appreciation scale, which contains ten statements about one's feelings towards their body. Actual/ideal self-discrepancy was calculated by measuring the number of changes that were made in order to get from the actual body to the ideal body. Analysis of the results reveals that (a) adjustments to certain avatar traits significantly correlate with body appreciation scores, and (b) some gender differences are notably predictive, e.g., with respect to "muscle", "middle body", and "weight"changes. As such, we may conclude that the developed avatar creation task which measures the discrepancy between the actual and ideal self, can indeed be used as a tool to identify (lower) body appreciation.

Developers face a time-consuming task when creating quests in video games. To ease this burden, Procedural Content Generation (PCG) techniques can be used to automatically generate quests. While PCG has been applied to various areas of game development, it can be difficult to create meaningful narratives for quests. This paper presents a new method for generating engaging quests by combining PCG with Natural Language Processing (NLP) using the models BERT and GPT-2 in a case study game called QuestVille. The paper details the implementation of these models and the challenges encountered. The results suggest that the use of BERT and GPT-2 has potential for creating compelling narrative content. Advancements in AI research may improve on the limitations discussed.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) in games has become more common in recent years. Procedural narrative, however, is still tricky, as designers fear that applying PCG to narrative means that they lose control over the system. In this paper, we attempt to tackle procedural generation of quests, a specific type of narrative, like in the Role Playing Games genre. To this end, we present StoryWorld, an Event-driven simulation of Items, Locations, Characters, and their Memories and Desires. Its modularity makes it easy to add new items and events. Future work could see its memory system made more realistic.

Video games and game-like experiment tasks are increasingly used to study human behavior. Prior work used such video games to study foraging behavior, including stressors such as hostile entities (i.e. predators). For this study we adapted a 3D video game to assess its potential for studying the impact of hostile environments on human foraging behavior. Two versions of the game were created that varied in terms of hostility, with the hostile condition including predatory non-player characters (NPCs). This pilot aimed to assess the suitability of the modified game for inducing and evaluating stress-related foraging patterns and pinpoint needed modifications for a large-scale study. Participants (n = 18) reported higher levels of stress in the hostile compared to the non-hostile environment. Results of the pilot indicate that modifications are needed to induce more pronounced behavioral effects, as the currently used measures of exploration (e.g., distance traveled; number of gathered items) were not affected by the hostility manipulation. We aim to further develop the game to improve effectiveness of the hostility manipulation and to investigate the effects with more elaborate exploration analyses (e.g., including measures of entropy).

There are few proposals to improve the interactivity and control of wave function collapse (WFC) in a mixed-initiative setting. Moreover, most WFC algorithm variants operate on an simple, unstructured set of tiles. This limitation on the level of control provided to designers hampers their creative work in various ways. We propose Hierarchical Semantic WFC, a generalized approach to WFC that organizes its tile-set into a hierarchy akin to a taxonomy induced by the relation 'consists-of'. In such a hierarchical structure, abstract tiles (i.e. non-leaf nodes) can represent the first sketchy intentions of a designer (e.g. forest, urban, desert,...) This allows a designer to interactively collapse a given area into abstract tiles, while subsequently, (and repeatedly, if desired) WFC can resolve each area into a variety of particular instances, by further collapsing it into (a valid combination of) its children tiles (whether leaves or not). We identify how this subtle tile-set change affects the whole WFC algorithm, describe a number of novel exploratory and interactive functions that this enables, and showcase these with a variety of examples generated with our prototype implementation. We conclude that these new mixed-initiative content generation methods can considerably reduce design iteration times and improve the assistance given to designers in expressing their creative intent.