Deconstructing Open-World Game Mission Design Formula: A Thematic Analysis Using an Action-Block Framework

Paper Title

Deconstructing Open-World Game Mission Design Formula: A Thematic Analysis Using an Action-Block Framework

Publication Info

• Topic area: Open-world game mission design analysis and visualization.
• Keywords: Open-world games, mission design, action blocks, MAQV, pacing, thematic analysis, game analytics, visualization, AAA games, player experience.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Open-world games often suffer from repetitive, formulaic mission structures that lead to player fatigue and lack of engagement. Designers lack systematic tools to analyze pacing, variation, and experiential balance across large mission portfolios.
• Significance: Addressing these issues can improve player engagement, reduce design redundancy, and enhance the overall quality of open-world games.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored quest formalisms, player behavior analytics, and narrative structures, but these approaches often focus on player telemetry rather than authored mission blueprints. Existing tools fail to bridge the gap between raw data and actionable design insights.

Solution

• Proposed approach: The Mission Action Quality Vector (MAQV) framework and an action block grammar to analyze and visualize mission structures.
• Novelty:
  1. A six-dimensional MAQV framework (Uniqueness, Combat, Narrative, Exploration, Problem-Solving, Emotion) to quantify mission qualities.
  2. An LLM-assisted pipeline to convert textual walkthroughs into structured action sequences.
  3. An interactive dashboard for visualizing mission pacing, structure, and experiential balance.
  4. A mixed-methods study combining quantitative validation and qualitative thematic analysis.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Constructed a dataset of 2,191 missions from 20 open-world games using community walkthroughs.
  • Used LLMs to extract action blocks and score them on MAQV dimensions.
  • Developed a dashboard with visualizations like radar charts, action timelines, and peak-valley pacing graphs.
  • Conducted user studies with players and designers to validate the framework and derive thematic insights.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Extraction fidelity: LLM-based action sequences achieved an 88.27% micro-F1 score against a human-labeled gold set.
  • Usability: System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 67.3 (borderline-positive), with UEQ-S scores indicating good pragmatic and above-average hedonic quality.
  • Validity: Median ratings of 5/7 for data credibility and action-list consistency.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Shifted focus from player telemetry to designer-authored mission structures.
  • Provided actionable insights into pacing, dimensional balance, and structural variation.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Quantitative validation of LLM outputs against human annotations.
  • Mixed-methods user study with 68 participants, including players and professional designers.
  • Reflexive thematic analysis to identify design patterns and trade-offs.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Simplifications in dimensional scoring and reliance on community-authored walkthroughs.
  • Limited coverage of optional content, failure loops, and emergent play.
  • Usability challenges for first-time users; planned improvements include onboarding and enhanced visualizations.
  • Future directions: integrating telemetry data, modeling branching structures, and refining cross-title comparability.

Summary

This paper introduces the Mission Action Quality Vector (MAQV) framework and an action block grammar to analyze open-world game missions. Using a dataset of 2,191 missions from 20 AAA titles, the authors developed a pipeline to extract and score action sequences, coupled with an interactive dashboard for visualization. The study validated the framework through quantitative metrics and thematic analysis, revealing patterns in pacing, dimensional trade-offs, and structural variation. While the tool demonstrates promise for reflective analysis, future work will address usability, data integration, and broader coverage. The framework provides a systematic method for improving mission design in open-world games.