Digital Arts and Culture 2009

Good gameplay has been characterized as a series of interesting choices. Therefore, to have gameplay of any sort requires the player to be presented with decisions. Given this definition, many quests within computer role-playing games are not playable as they currently exist. Instead, quests are given to the player as a series of tasks to perform in a specific way in order to advance the story within the game. We look at making quests playable – adding choices for the player – and what a system that could support playable quests would look like. Finally, we address the impact playable quests would have on a designer and discuss QuestBrowser, the system we created to handle these concerns.