Abstract
Playability is a key factor in video-games. From a narrative standpoint, the play process is usually designed as sequences of episodes triggered by the player’s motivations, which unfold along a sense of suspense-relief. Suspense, as a factor on engagement, has a strong impact on the narrative of video-games: when it decreases, so does the engagement. This is a common pattern when players are aware that losing is unavoidable. As we point out, many players disconnect from the game in this situation. In this paper we evaluate how suspense affects playability, to analyse how the lack of uncertainty due to the knowledge of the rules may degrade Dead by Daylight game players experience when they are bound to fail. We have observed that players acknowledging that there are no chances to win tend to leave the game. Results also reveal that suspense is modulated by the player’s knowledge of the game.
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Notes
- 1.
German Developer Award 2016: Best Game Design, Best PC/Console Game and Best German Game.
- 2.
Victims know when the killer is approaching because of a increasing heartbeat sound, urging them to run away.
- 3.
In case the YouTuber ignored this screen, the video progress bar was displaced to the last moments of the game, manually checking the status of each player.
- 4.
In the current version, Dead by Daylight has six different killers and scenarios, for a total of thirty six different combinations.
- 5.
Killer can abandon to the victim on the floor, bleeding to death. This is an usual strategy when there are not hook near around.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the Andalusian Government under the University of Cadiz programme for Researching and Innovation in Education 2015/2016 (SOL-201500054211-TRA); by the IDiLyCo project (TIN2015-66655-R) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness; and by the projects WHIM 611560 and PROSECCO 600653 funded by the European Commission, Framework Program 7, the ICT theme, and the Future and Emerging Technologies FET program.
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Delatorre, P., León, C., Salguero, A., Mateo-Gil, C. (2017). The Long Path of Frustration: A Case Study with Dead by Daylight . In: Rojas, I., Joya, G., Catala, A. (eds) Advances in Computational Intelligence. IWANN 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10306. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59147-6_57
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