13/03/2025
Author: Joan Josep Pons
Programme: Doctoral Programme in Arts and Humanities
Language: Spanish
Supervision: Antonio José Planells de la Maza, Jordi Sánchez-Navarro
Faculty / Institute: Doctoral School UOC
Subjects: Communication
Key words: Role plays, Interactive narrative, Procedural narrative, Collaborative narrative, Emergent narrative
Area of knowledge: Arts and Humanities
Abstract:
Analog role-playing games generate emergent narratives thanks, in part, to the use of procedural, stochastic, and heuristic generation tools and systems. These stories are generated in collaboration between the players who control the characters and the figure of the game master. The game master controls the non-player characters, the texture of the fiction, the narrative and the authentication system of this fiction, that is, the rules. These emergent narratives constructed in collaboration between players, game master and system, sometimes become memorable events that the players highlight and that are remembered and shared among the members of their own ideospheres (a group of players) and semiospheres (the analogue role-playing players in general). In this thesis, thanks to the double theoretical framework on role-playing games and on playful narrative, a model of analysis and description of these memorable experiences is built and, thanks to the analysis of transcripts of analog role-playing game sessions and the location and description of memorable events, a detailed set of tools is proposed to facilitate the design of systems that favor both the generation of emergent narrative scenarios and, by extension, the convergence of these scenarios towards experiences and events that last in the players' memories.