Stanislavski's System as a Game Design Method: A Case Study

This paper examines how Konstantin Stanislavski's acting method can serve as a game design framework, using the adaptation of Lope de Vega's seventeenth-century Spanish comedy La Dama Boba into an educational point-and-click adventure built on the eAdventure platform. Drawing on Laurel's view that constraints can enhance creativity, the authors treat theatre-derived structure as a means of shaping player experience. Stanislavski's core concepts, including objectives, conflicts, units, events, and the superobjective, are used to segment the dramatic text into discrete game events and to organize the play's plot into a sequence of challenges.

The central method works by converting the play's scenes into five milestone-driven stages through a conversion table that maps dramatic scenes to game tasks. Stanislavski's agenda technique, which tracks the objectives and conflicts of each event, is applied to make the protagonist Laurencio a coherent player character, with his superobjective defined as "to become rich." Playtesting produced practical lessons, notably the value of allowing non-linear completion of interdependent units and the ongoing tension between player freedom and the need to preserve the play's narrative for educational purposes.

The authors conclude that the character-centered method successfully divided the source material into key milestones and maintained consistent objectives and conflicts for the player character, reducing narrative gaps in the game. A clearly stated superobjective appears to help players accept specific in-game goals, and the authors propose a multicursal agenda as a way to balance freedom with structural bindings. The approach shows promise for character coherence and engagement, though the authors acknowledge that player engagement has not yet been empirically evaluated and call for further research and a second case study to test these findings.