Archaeological Gameworld Affordances:A Grounded Theory of How Players Interpret Environmental Storytelling

Environmental storytelling is a design technique commonly used to convey narrative through assemblages of content in video games. To date there has been limited empirical work investigating how and on what basis players form interpretations about game environments. We report on a study in which participants (N=202) played a game about exploring a procedurally generated ruined village and were then surveyed on their interpretations. We draw on methods and theory from archaeology – a field that specialises in the interpretation of material remains – to support a grounded theory analysis of the survey responses, from which we form the theory of an archaeological gameworld mental model. Our study draws a novel link between affordance theory, archaeological knowledge production and game systems, and contributes new theoretical concepts that can be applied to procedurally generated and handcrafted methods in game design, narrative design and game preservation.