Paper ID: 2411.02714

Game Plot Design with an LLM-powered Assistant: An Empirical Study with Game Designers

Seyed Hossein Alavi, Weijia Xu, Nebojsa Jojic, Daniel Kennett, Raymond T. Ng, Sudha Rao, Haiyan Zhang, Bill Dolan, Vered Shwartz

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.

Submitted: Nov 5, 2024