The game making up this thesis, Tracks in Snow, and by extension the underlying technology of Puppitor, began with a simple premise: what if instead of players choosing what they wanted to say they instead were mainly focused on how they were saying it? This approach has been heavily inspired by the work on theater productions, particularly when production started, seeing the actors and directors take the words I’d written in quite different directions than what I’d had initially envisioned. Also let’s face it, we call a play a play. Why not try to make the playing of a play the basis for digital character interaction? After all, it’s been working for humans for several thousand years. To reach these ends I built a computational caricature of theatrical acting practices, including Stanislavsky’s Method, Anne Bogart and Tina Landau’s Viewpoints, and Zeami’s Treatises on Noh drama as a way to shift players away from controlling the structure of a narrative and towards control over the details. Tracks in Snow is built in Ren’Py to wrap this novel interaction style in a more familiar format. The game’s story focuses on one character’s crisis of faith and another’s longing for a home that only really exists in the past. My hope is that the interface I have created gets players to focus more on role-playing characters than trying to optimize their responses.

Videogames have historically relied on players picking what their characters say or do from a list or entering their desired action into a text parser and then having those intentions carried out in some form by the game characters. There is an understanding that a videogame player exists somewhere between an audience member and a stage actor---but rarely are players allowed to express themselves in a manner similar to an actor. This thesis argues that the acting and directing knowledge of theater is a potentially bountiful resource for designing player and NPC interactions and proposes the reversal of the player picking an action and the characters acting out the response: have the player gesture and move as their character and interpret those actions to alter the lines of dialogue characters are speaking (or in this case, displaying on screen). To illustrate this, this thesis presents a literature review of theatrical methodology, its existing relationship to games, and a survey of projects in the interactive narrative and character interaction spaces. The chosen theater practices provide a useful basis for a new type of interaction between players and non-player characters. Additionally, particularly when looking at acting practices, their major concerns with the relationship between character and actor provide useful language to describe and further explore the relationship between the player and their avatar. As part of this exploration, we created Puppitor, a rules-based input detection system that translates mouse and keyboard inputs into emotional affect values for use in changing the tone and direction of dialogue heavy scenes. We discuss the design principles behind Puppitor's architecture, how its inspiration from theater and fighting games influenced the implementation of each system module, authoring of rulesets and animations, and propose a direction for further work in the realm of interactive drama and storytelling more broadly.