Distractives: Framing-Based Linguistic Markers that Distract Players from Solving In-Game Puzzles in Role-Playing Video Games

In-game puzzles are a core element in role-playing video games, commonly abbreviated as RPG. They have distinctive characteristics from general puzzles. This distinctiveness is perceived from how in-game puzzles influence and determine narrative and mechanical progressions of the players. In designing in-game puzzles, the designers have to consider the difficulty balance – the balance between clues and distractors. In this study, we propose what we call distractives, linguistic markers employed as a distractor in in-game puzzles. We employed the theories of frame semantics by Fillmore, ludic language for in-game puzzle designs by Purnama, Nababan, Santosa, and Purnomo, and bias language by Recasens, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil and Jurafsky. Twelve RPGs were investigated to prove the presence of distractives. The findings indicate that distractives operate through framing by employing bias language to frame falsity as truth from which players are expected to be distracted. We further classified the framing acts into causal, chronological, conditional, directional, reciprocal, reflectional and representational framings. Game developers could employ this typology as a guideline to balance the difficulty of distractives for in-game puzzles in role-playing video games. Future studies could employ distractives as a theoretical basis for investigating distractives as a speech act in the context of in-game puzzle design.