Astroneer

Procedural Content Generation, Player Agency, and Playfulness in Survival-Crafting Game Astroneer

This paper examines how the design of survival-crafting games shapes player agency, using the procedurally generated voxel-based game Astroneer as a case study.

• The paper argues that agency in avatar-based games is multidimensional, and proposes a four-lens framework covering agency afforded in space, in time, in the degree of tailoring of the avatar and world to player preference, and in story development.
• The principal finding is that Astroneer, which blends the procedurally generated dungeon tradition with Minecraft's sandbox model, affords greater player freedom in some of the four agency dimensions but not all of them.
• Procedural content generation is presented as a long-established design method valued for being less resource-intensive than handcrafting, while its aesthetic and agency implications have received only brief treatment in computer science and game studies.