Treating Games as Plays? Computational Approaches to the Detection of Scenes in Game Dialogs
Abstract
Digital games are a complex multimodal phenomenon that is examined in a variety of ways by the highly interdisciplinary field of game studies. In this article, we focus on the structural aspect of the diegetic language of games and examine the extent to which established methods of computational drama analysis can also be successfully applied to digital games. Initial experiments show that both games and drama texts have an inventory of characters that drive the plot forward. In dramas, this plot is usually subdivided into individual acts and scenes. In games, however, such systematic segmentation is the exception rather than the rule, or if it is present, it is implemented very differently in different games. In this paper, we therefore focus on exploring alternative ways of making scene-like structures in game dialogs identifiable with the help of computers. As a result of these experiments, exciting future perspectives emerge that raise the question of whether computer-aided methods of scene recognition, which are inspired by media such as games and films, can also be applied to classical dramas in the future in order to fundamentally question their historical-editorial scene classification.