Prom week

Abstract

PromWeek places players in a typical high-school, abuzz with excitement over the upcoming prom. Players indirectly sculpt the social landscape by having these hapless highschoolers engage in social exchanges with each other. The results of these social exchanges are many and varied-ranging from mild fluctuations in respect to characters professing their eternal love for one another-and are informed by over 5,000 sociocultural considerations encoded in first order logic. Through massaging the interpersonal relationships and learning the personal intricacies of the characters, the player can solve a series of social puzzles; such as making the class-nerd the Prom King, or bringing peace between feuding jocks and preppies.

Papers, Please and the systemic approach to engaging ethical expertise in videogames

“…Nevertheless, our current ability to create systems of meaningful play cannot rival the stories we can tell in the scripted approach. Personal and social dynamics in particular are difficult to model and the hunt for a playable system of "social physics" is still an open research problem (Khandaker- Kokoris 2015;McCoy et al 2011McCoy et al , 2013. As a result, systemic gameplay tends to be limited to physical and economic interaction, with relatively anonymous game characters.…”

Using extracted features to inform alignment-driven design ideas in an educational game

“…Consider a hypothetical example of using McCoy's Prom Week [23], a social simulation game, to teach the nuances of the concept of social capital [29]. Students could be tasked with navigating a social simulation with the goal of asking their ideal date out to prom, but to do so they must properly curate their social capital in order to be able to ask their friends for assistance.…”

A Panorama of Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games

“…Starting from popular independent attempts like Façade [62] and Prom Week [113] to the commercial success of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Softworks, 2011) narrative has traditionally been amongst the key factors of player experience and immersion; particularly in narrativeheavy games as the ones aforementioned. Examples of sophisticated computational narrative techniques crossing over from academia to commercial games include the celebrated storytelling game Versu [114].…”