All the world's a stage: A playable model of social interaction inspired by dramaturgical analysis

The design of video games has been driven primarily by innovations in graphics technology and our ability to model physical spaces. However, the exploration of other areas of game design, such as interactive and social storyworlds, has been relatively slow. Games featuring complex story-driven gameplay are rare because we lack playable models of these design areas. Unlike graphics and physics simulations with their common language of mathematics, models of social interaction and storytelling have no such representation to serve as a basis for creating playable models of their domains. Additionally, we have little knowledge of how to present these types of gameplay to players as examples from which insight can be drawn are rare.;Current games that contain playable social interactions or storyworlds either have limited content caused by the large growth of story spaces to be authored, such as computer role playing games that use dialogue trees, or have abstract interactions that tell no concrete story, such as many social life simulation games. These games either offer a limited complexity of choices to the player with detailed realization of character interactions in the storyworld or a significant amount of player choice complexity with abstract character interactions.;This problems are addressed in this dissertation via Comme il Faut (CiF), a playable model of social interaction and authoring approach for creating social storyworlds. Through drawing inspiration from social science, particularly dramaturgical analysis, CiF provides a knowledge represent that is able to encode and reason about social interaction in a way that is amenable to authoring storyworlds. This knowledge representation enables the retargeting of performances consisting of fully-realized character dialogue to contextually appropriate social situations. This allows for the creation of storyworlds with a new level of player choice complexity with detailed realization of character interactions. Additionally, the combination of a procedural playable model with performance retargeting provides a solution to problem of authoring storyworlds with high player choice complexity.;To explore the newly-opened area of design while testing and improving CiF, Prom Week, a critically acclaimed experimental game featuring social game play via CiF, was created and released to the public. Because the game features a large amount of content used to enable a large space of stories for the player to explore, this dissertation features descriptions of the design, authoring approach, and design insights learned while creating Prom Week. Additionally, this dissertation includes evaluations of Prom Week based on player traces to determine the both how Prom Week provides customized gameplay experience to players and to determine if players are exhibiting strategic play. This is followed by a comparison of authoring and complexity of story space of Prom Week with the best of the story-driven computer role playing games.;To compliment CiF’s turn-based interactions, this dissertation features a description of the Holodeck system, a test bed for socially aware AI avatars taking the roles of supporting characters, and an evaluation explore the complications that arise when using social artificial intelligence systems in real-time environments.