Games as Conversation

We present a metaphor through which to study games: games as conversation, which casts gameplay as a communicative exchange between player and game. We propose to view aspects of gameplay as speech acts, as defined by Austin and Searle, and we present several examples that illustrate the diverse locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts present in the design of digital games. Through our perspective, we are able to cast problems relevant to the interactive entertainment community as discourse problems, where an interactive system must determine what to “say,” in order to elicit in the minds of players a specific mental model that will allow them to perform successfully in the game. We conclude with a research agenda that proposes to leverage the artificial intelligence paradigm of discourse planning to tackle the discourse problems of interactive entertainment.