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limitation. For a consistent and coherent world this is necessity as the link between
emergent play, story and social world is deeply intertwined [10]. A play boundary in
this case may just be an implicit or innate agreement on how to act, such as a 'magic
circle' [11] or player attitude [12] or by placing specific design limitations on
behavior to contain emergence [13].
Fictional worlds that aim for coherence should be designed to develop implicit
events [14] rather than explicitly authoring sequences that will potentially exhaust the
system of interesting outcomes. A good example of this can be seen in Minecraft [15],
a successful player driven fictional world where activities mirror aspects of real
world construction. However the true success of the Minecraft experience is largely
dependant on social aspects of co-creativity and community engagement. For this
reason, emergent fictional worlds need the drivers of collaboration and community to
develop creative potential.
2.2
Player Experience and Participation
The narrative paradox as outlined by [16] and others suggests emergent play and
narrative would benefit from a character based model where specific behaviors may
be interpreted by the player and a narrative induced from these collective
environmental cues. This presents further issues in maintaining narrative
comprehension as it requires the active involvement of the player in the experience.
Players of emergent experiences are heavily dependant on the act of co-creation
and collaboration for emergent narrative to be recognised at a macro level. Such an
experience would require the player to act in similar ways to an improvisational actor
with some understanding of narrative consequences based on actions of themselves
and others. This has been discussed [17] [18] [19] and further evaluated as a possible
scenario [20] of emergent development of interactive digital narrative. The findings
conclude that actors develop shared mental models and cognitive converge over
specific dramatic performances that drive narrative forward.
Cognitive patterns such as these could be useful for understanding design for
emergent play with actors who have the appropriate concern for the mutual
progression of the narrative scenario. However the issue is that players are generally
not trained as improvisational actors nor are they necessarily open to cues for
collaboration. For design of emergent play, providing these cues can equip players
with the tools they need to perform more like actors sensitive to the narrative context
at hand. As such, developing interface metaphors that describe or explain the simple
actions possible in the fictional environment in contrast with the familiar actions in
the real world, can demonstrate how to act accordingly. This type of metaphor can
also be described as an affordance [21] and provides an innate understanding of how
to perform within the environment.
Players perceive affordances they see in the fictional world and understand them
through the affordances they commonly associate with the real world [22]. In other
words, they import the knowledge from their interaction of the real environment to
understand how to act in the fictional world. This is akin to a conversation where
embodiment, or innate knowledge of how the body acts within the world, can be
