| Summary: | Walking simulators - a genre of games in which the player's main set of actions includes reading notes and exploring environments - are uniquely suited for delivering impactful narrative experiences. In games such as What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017) and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2014), players are encouraged to weave a disjointed narrative together and make their own conclusions about events previously transpired in the environments they explore. However, games of this genre tend to lack player agency. Players mostly do not influence the story since they are more passively intuiting past events. And when they are given the option to converse with other characters, such as in Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016), their dialogue options are a set of scripted lines. As a game writer and designer, I have always been curious about investigating methods to address this problem. My goal through Eighty-Six Moon Road was to build an experimental narrative game with walking simulator genre conventions in mind, that utilizes a user-generated dialogue system. The game asks the player to converse with an AI about the game environment and story by typing into a text box. By analyzing keywords in the player's text input, the AI chooses a scripted dialogue response to use in the conversation. I also conducted two studies to examine the extent to which I am successful at implementing this character AI as well as the game as a whole. I theorized that my efforts would be successful if players felt more emotional engagement while interacting with an 'intelligent' character AI using their own words, rather than a more simplistic character AI that gave less nuanced responses. As a result of my experiment, I found that players indeed reported more positive attitudes and higher levels of emotional engagement with my final prototype and 'intelligent' AI. I conclude with strategies on how I would further improve my game's mechanics and design.--Author's abstract
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