Quest and Level Design Pattern Analysis in Role-Playing Games

Position: Undergraduate intern

I worked closely with a team of undergraduates under graduate student Gillian Smith to pin down and explore quest and level design patterns in RPGs. Being the avid player and lover of role playing games, this was an amazing piece of research for me to be a part of. Along with my team of four undergrads, I was tasked with uncovering a set amount of quest and level design patterns each week, and entering them onto the Wiki that served as our research compilation. I was able to delve into RPGs with an analytical eye, revealing quest patterns like compilation quests and contextualizing quests, and level patterns such as the nucleus, blockade, and overworld. Our research culminated in a paper drawing from the Wiki that we created being written and published for the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2011), presented in Vancouver, Canada, November 28th – December 1st, 2011. The paper is entitled “Situating Quests: Design Patterns for Quest and Level Design in Role-Playing Games,” and is linked below.

Link to wiki: http://rpgpatterns.soe.ucsc.edu/doku.php?id=start

Link to publication: http://sokath.com/main/files/smith-icids11.pdf