Game Design Commons^™

Beyond Affection Meters: A Framework For Relationship Repair Mechanics And Meaningful Play, Christopher B. Del Gesso

Theses

This thesis develops and tests a repair-centered framework for relationship mechanics in narrative games, positioned as an alternative to the affection-meter model that reduces relationships to a single accumulating score. Drawing on eudaimonic media research, relational repair theory, and interpretive-attribution research, the framework argues that meaningful relationship play depends on tracking multiple, potentially divergent relational dimensions; distinguishing repair attempts from repair outcomes; modeling interpretation of player actions rather than fixed action-to-effect mappings; and treating stable, non-restorative endings as legitimate outcomes rather than failure states. A comparative survey of five commercial games, Fallout 4, Tell Me Why, Life is Strange Remastered, …

Leveraging Generative Artificial Intelligence To Launch An Independent Game Studio, Douglas Evans

Theses

This project report examines how Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) can be integrated into the early formation and operations of an independent/indie game studio. Using a qualitative, practice-based single-case study approach, the project focused on Boar’s Head Studio, LLC. A human-in-the-loop approach was maintained with Generative AI used to support company formation, ideation, planning, documentation, analysis, coding assistance, marketing preparation, and community-building preparation

The report concludes that Generative AI can serve as a meaningful system integrated into the studio pipeline when used with structured, repeatable, human-in-the-loop processes. The project contributes a practical, case-based framework that may be useful to other …

Coffee Bindings, M. Ermolenko

Theses and Dissertations

Coffee Bindings is a multi-media interactive installation weaving themes of history, memory, death, and spaces that no longer exist through the lens of coffee readings and a mixture of physical and digital media. By navigating ghost spaces (spaces/places that used to exist but don’t anymore), and looking at survival through three time periods, Coffee Bindings jumps through liminal time and space, navigating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh in 2020-2024, while also tying them to personal family history with the death of my father and the loss of the physical space of …

Drag Attack, Chase Jones

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Drag Attack is a single-player beat 'em up game built for PC. Players take on the role of Chicago drag artist Molly Jolly Christmas, as she fights to stop the evil president Billy the Bigot from passing HB69, a bill that will ban drag once and for all. With mechanics inspired by classic games in the genre, and the addition of drag-inspired actions like purse smacking and gown spinning, the game provides a cathartic outlet for queer gamers who are ready to fight back against hateful rhetoric and legislature. Enemies are based on proponents of anti-drag legislation, such as conservative-leaning …

Sk8er Skull, David Norton

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Sk8r Skull is a single player video game where players must traverse the environment as a skull on a skateboard, in an effort to defeat the wizard who has stolen the rest of the skull’s body. Players must move, destroy, and grind their way through the level in order to reach the wizard. By traversing the area, players will learn the mechanics of the game, as well as some of the in-game world’s backstory. The production of Sk8r Skull was driven by examining game feel, and the “flow” state.

Floodfriend, Lauren Watson

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Floodfriend is a two-dimensional puzzle-platformer game with two main characters that are trying to navigate their way out of a cave system. The player controls both the human and the monster of the duo: the hiker responds to direct arrow key input, while the monster can only be persuaded by using the hiker’s flashlight to swim and climb to otherwise inaccessible areas. The game is equal parts a simulation and a toy, encouraging the player to try different methods of interaction to garner the results they want to see. From a design perspective, the game is centered on the push …

In The Light, Z Sarkissian

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In The Light, a first-person adventure mystery video game, seeks to explore the process of grief and its effect on memory through experimental level design and game mechanics. Through atmospheric, experiential storytelling and a soundscape derived from my own home videos, I aim to guide the player through my own personal experience of learning to grieve the truth behind traumatic memories with the goal of supporting those who have been through similar struggles in life. Additionally, I aim to experiment with the idea of games as a space for memorialization; my project attempts to utilize the video game artifact as …

Inherited Wounds: Navigating Intergenerational Trauma Through Cooperative Play, Ayza Sheikh

Theses and Dissertations

'Strength' for Pakistani women is often defined as compromise, sacrifice, and silence. This definition has shaped intergenerational struggles in which women's self-narratives are constructed through suppression. Inherited Wounds seeks to address the trauma of suppression by creating a safe space for expression that fosters reflective and emotion-driven dialogue between Pakistani mothers and daughters.

Using interactive storytelling and embodied play, I developed a choice-based, narrative-driven video game and accompanying gesture-based controller. The game unfolds across childhood, marriage, and motherhood, mirroring the cycle of intergenerational struggle. Navigating choices in the game requires physical, intimate cooperation. The game uses the protagonist’s life as …

Cards With Class: Formalizing A Simplified Collectible Card Game, Dan Ha

University Honors Theses

Collectible card games (CCGs) have been a wildly popular game genre since the release of Wizards of the Coast's Magic: The Gathering. These games revolve around their thousands of cards and the hundreds of thousands of interactions they can create with their many effects. For designers, it is an incredibly demanding task to ensure that every single card works properly and that each card's text unambiguously conveys its intended behavior in all cases. The task only grows more difficult over time as the number of cards in the game grows and card effects become more complex or experimental. If the …

Scientific Frontiers In Game Studies, Prthvi Kapilavai

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Video game studies as a dynamic field has benefited from this synthesis of the scientific method and critical theories that, together, enrich our understanding of video games as both technological artifacts and cultural products.(Girina and Jung, 2019). More than a mere shadow-boxing between disciplinary echo chambers, this kind of integration enriches our understanding of video game form and experience while projecting a more informed path forward into game design and game scholarship. It demonstrates how findings from psychology and cognitive science describe or explain video games’ enticement or their potential for learning, and how theories of media from the humanities …

Spirits Of The King, Ali Al-Ani

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Spirits of the King (SotK) is a 1v1 card game where players use essential resources to conjure spirits from a shared pool to defeat their opponent. Players must make strategic sacrifices to keep themselves from danger or to threaten their opponent, ultimately revealing how much they are willing to risk for victory. The themes, mechanics, and material design of SotK are very heavily inspired by information found in Aleister Crowley’s The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Lost & Found (Game Series) [Book Chapter], Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Description of game series for use in the classroom with best practices.

On The Way, Shawn Roberts

Game Design

On The Way is a board game developed by Shawn Roberts. This game is centered around navigating the game space while performing tasks based on the character chosen. Players must race to finish their task before they can advance around the board.

An “Other” Experience Of Videogames: Analyzing The Connections Between Videogames And The Lived Experience Of Chronic Pain, Gracie Straznickas

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In this dissertation I argue for the connections between the lived experience of chronic pain and videogames, exploring what interacts with and influences them. To answer this, I draw on cripistemology as I engage in autoethnography, close-reading and close-gameplay, restorying, mixed methods design, formal interviews, surveys, and inductive coding. I further argue for pushing back against the unhelpful binaries that define the “human” and a false idea of “universal” experience or ability, instead pointing to the intersectionality that better reflects the biopolitics of disability, including both debility and capacity. I engage with these methods in three specific projects that consider …

Hampton Roads' Building Resilient Communities Flood Game, Gul Ayaz, Katherine Smith, Rafael Diaz, Joshua G. Behr

Modeling, Simulation and Visualization Student Capstone Conference

As rising sea levels and subsequent recurrent flooding disproportionately affects coastal areas, it is crucial to develop a heightened awareness of the impacts of natural disasters on communities and the environments they live in. The Hampton Roads’ Building Resilient Communities (BRC) Flood Game is a simulation role-playing game designed to allow players to increase their understanding of the impact of various community response interventions to sea level rise and recurrent flooding. Players will examine and assess the tradeoffs of resiliency investments, the impact policies may have on the population, and the amount of time return on investment takes. The BRC …

Activist-Casual Game Design: Iterating Serious Games Through Research-Creation, Daniel J. King

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

How can activists and scholars design serious game projects that attract and engage people, that are inviting for many types of players, and that empower players to create positive change? My hypothesis was that the Activist-Casual Game Design Framework I published in 2021 could facilitate this work. I took a design-based research approach to answer my research question by way of demonstration and self-reflection through a creative case study of the production of an activist-casual game called Climate Somnia. Chapter 1 explains the literature review and synthesis behind the creation of the original framework, and Chapter 2 reviews the …

The Foreboding Campaign System, Michael Fetters

Theses

This project creates a new campaign setting compatible with the Dungeons and Dragons system utilizing the SRD Open Game License content as a starting point. The campaign setting created establishes mechanics allowing for narrative interaction between the past and present timeline of events in the world of Lunaria. This new system, entitled The Foreboding, utilizes a shift mechanic to alter the player characters in several possible ways, ranging from changes in race or character history to interactions with past time periods and events that alter the present timeline of the narrative. New character options for race and class were also …

Collaborative Constructions: Designing High School History Curriculum With The Lost & Found Game Series, Owen Gottlieb, Shawn Clybor

Articles

This chapter addresses design research and iterative curriculum design for the Lost & Found games series. The Lost & Found card-to-mobile series is set in Fustat (Old Cairo) in the twelfth century and focuses on religious laws of the period. The first two games focus on Moses Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, a key Jewish law code. A new expansion module which was in development at the time of the fieldwork described in this article that introduces Islamic laws of the period, and a mobile prototype of the initial strategy game has been developed with support National Endowment for the Humanities. The …

Hexgen Roguevania, Conrad Garcia

Theses

This project is inspired by procedural generation methods, Metroid, Castlevania, Rogue, and modern roguelikes. This project is structured around the notion of how procedural game content can be experienced when it is tied directly to player progression. The focus of this project incorporates procedurally generated content so that it can be altered during gameplay. In a sense, this idea brings level content to the player, instead of the player travelling to new zones. The resulting game world starts visually coherent, changing into a world that resembles a patchwork of different biomes crafted by the player’s decisions to progress the game’s …

Raid Elite, Wenda Li

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This game inspiration are the real-time strategy game and raid in MMORPG. In this game, you need to get familiar with and operate five different characters. There are two bosses you can choose to fight. This game use Unity 2020.3.18f2c2 as game engine. All art is hand drawn. The design goal is making a game with certain depth which requires some effort to win. The design challenge for myself is design some interesting boss fights and accomplish a complete game which has good visual feedback.

The Machine Upstairs, Jacob Friedfeld

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Immersive simulation design, broadly speaking, is a game design philosophy centered around player expression, emergent gameplay, and dynamic narrative. Contrary to what the phrase may imply simply by reading it, immersion in and of itself is not necessarily enough for a game to be classified as an “immersive sim” (or IMSIM for short). Many different types of games can utilize immersion to great effect, but immersive simulations require a level of flexibility and rule/system-based approaches beyond the scope of games that occupy similar genres.

The Machine Upstairs represents an exploration of the immersive simulation philosophy and an investigation into its …

The Lighthouse Is Calling Me, Ina Muphy

Graduate Artistry Projects and Performances

This is a story about the longing for and pursuit of Home when confronted with the reality that one has been resigned to settling their heart in exile.

Towards A Model Of The Design Process For Games, John Healy, Charlie Cullen

Conference Papers

In this paper, we present an approach to studying the game design process by drawing upon general models of design to support research into the process of game design. Several general models of design exist to consider the processes through which designers work. Many of these fit within a structure of analysis, synthesis and evaluation that was first proposed by Christopher Jones in 1963 and later adapted by Bryan Lawson to account for the messy nature of design and the undertaking of these activities while negotiating between problem and solution. This paper proposes the adaptation of Lawson’s model of design …

Abandoned Spaces, Anthony Tate

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

The goal of this project is to show how color can display an emotional connection to the environment. How colors can be portrayed to human emotions without telling the audience. As well as having the audience imagining what kind of economy that used to be in the environment. The objective is to create a game that will tell a story from the environment and how colors are used to help tell a story of the environment. This thesis project is a game that attempts to show how colors can be related to emotions.

Designing An Interactive Theatre Game With Dynamic Asynchronous Play, Ardian Amiti

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

This project proposes the use of asynchronous narrative mechanics and dynamic elements of gameplay to further the player’s sense of interaction with characters and the environment of the game, inspired by interactive theatre performances such as Sleep No More. The player plants seeds in a garden which is maintained by several Non-Playable Characters, influencing both the environment and the narrative. Scenes occur according to the state of the garden, but do not wait for the player to be present. Plants grow and wilt as time passes. Sometimes the player cedes control as the characters tend to or cut down plants, …

Introduction To Game Design, Development, And Criticism (Game 201t), Kevin Moberly, Richard E. Ferdig (Ed.), Emily Baumgartner (Ed.), Enrico Gandolfi (Ed.)

English Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English and Creative Writing Summer Fellows

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …

(Fun)Ction: Developing Games From A Narrative Standpoint, Julian Barocas

English and Creative Writing Presentations

My goal with this project has been to deepen my understanding of why people play games, how to make games narratively compelling, and what technical methods are effective in play. This has allowed me to investigate both the technical, scholarly assessments of board game dynamics while also exploring their real-world applications, successes, and weaknesses. Building on my research, my project has culminated in a full prototype of an original board game that has both narrative structure and an engaging gameplay structure. I have also produced a reflection paper on the experience and an annotated bibliography of my research texts and …