Designing plots for multiplayer games with the use of graph transformation rules

The paper presents a new application of the graph model of the game world and graph rules describing players’ actions in this world. This time, this model and rules are used to design storylines in multiplayer role-playing games. The proposed model is suitable for collaborative plot design, as the set of rules describing game actions can be divided into subsets corresponding to particular quests, which are then assigned to different plot writers. The main contributions of this paper are: firstly, a new type of graph transformation rules for construction of storylines in games that require competition or collaboration between multiple players, and secondly, a prototype networked application to validate the proposed ideas and to serve as a playtesting tool for the designed sets of rules. In the presented application, the graph world model is stored in a Neo4j graph database server. Application instances running on players’ computers communicate with this server. The paper presents the application’s operation on an example of a simple two-player game.