Emotional Attachments for Story Construction in Virtual Game Worlds

This paper proposes that emotional attachments, which it calls "sentiments," can serve as the deep narrative structure of virtual game worlds. The author introduces the Mind Module, a semi-autonomous agent architecture built for a prototype called World of Minds, in which avatars possess personalities modeled on the Five Factor Model and thirteen emotion nodes. Sentiments, defined as emotional attachments between an avatar and specific objects or entity types, are designed to decay at rates distinct from moods and traits. The system was compared against the OCC emotion model, and the design rationale centers on the idea that such attachments generate narrative potential by giving players meaningful agency within the world.

The central empirical evidence comes from a paper-prototype play test involving ten guided sessions. Participants strongly preferred sentiments formed through their own interactions, which received a mean rating of 4.58 out of 5, compared with 4.0 for limited-choice sentiments and 3.33 for randomly assigned ones. Around 80 percent of interviewees reported that interaction-based attachments felt sensible and meaningful, and 75 percent of randomly assigned sentiment objects were correctly recalled, suggesting that players retained some information from arbitrary associations. The author acknowledges that face-to-face testing may have encouraged responses aimed at pleasing the test leader.

A further playtest examined how players responded when sentiments were assigned randomly. Roughly 40 percent of players rationalized arbitrary attachments with ad hoc back-stories, and many found such assignments unsatisfying. The author concludes that sentiments should be rooted in a story's deep structure, with players acting as the principal drivers of emotional development. As a remedy, the paper suggests "life path" systems that could formalize player back-stories and tie them to functional in-world entities.

The paper's main contribution is a proposed architecture of emotionally charged connections between entities in game worlds. Its evidence, however, is qualitative and drawn from a small sample, so the findings should be regarded as preliminary indications rather than established results.