Prom Week: social physics as gameplay

Abstract

In this paper, we present Prom Week, a social simulation game about the interpersonal lives of a group of high school students in the week leading up to their prom. By starting the design of the game with a theory of social interaction, Prom Week is able to present satisfying stories that reflect the player's choices in a wide possibility space -- two features that rarely accompany one another. This paper reports the design details of how Prom Week utilizes social physics to achieve rich character specificity while maintaining a highly dynamic story space.