ABSTRACT
Dramaturgy is the design of emotional experience. For digital games that are intended to tell a story, game design includes anticipation of the players’ experiences, which will lead to excitement, fascination, thrill, perhaps to immersion and flow. What players will experience takes place over time. Events that happen are linearly ordered and those that may potentially happen form a partially ordered space, the game’s story space. Dramaturgical game design is the anticipation of varying experiences and their thoughtful arrangement in a partially ordered space of events that players may possibly experience when playing the game. The approach particularly applies to those digital games that bear the potentials of telling a story.
