Characterizing gameplay in a player model of game story comprehension

This work seeks to validate the use of a situation model (a model for the comprehension processes in non-interactive narrative) for use modeling a player's comprehension process within interactive narratives and games. Unlike conventional narratives, games contain actions and events that might not carry any narrative significance; consequently, a cognitive model of player understanding may require a new distinction between "narratively important" and "narratively unimportant" events. This hypothesis was tested in an experiment using Event Segmentation Theory. Our results failed to reject the null hypothesis (Fisher's exact test, p = 1) but were insightful. Narrative importance seems to be perceptually oriented, and dependent on the outcomes of the event in question. Although our data failed to reject the null hypothesis, more work must be done before rejecting the necessity of the distinction between narratively important and unimportant events when modeling a player's comprehension process of an unfolding story-focused game.