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

TL;DR

This study introduces GamePlot, an LLM-powered tool that assists game designers in creating and testing immersive narratives, highlighting user satisfaction and the limitations of current AI in generating complex content.

Contribution

The paper presents GamePlot, an innovative LLM-based assistant for game narrative design, and provides empirical insights into user satisfaction and AI limitations.

Findings

High user satisfaction with generated plots

Designers feel ownership over narratives

LLMs have limitations in complex content generation

Abstract

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.