The Guilty Game Designer: Are Games Data Generators or Storytellers?

With games, designers create a universe, where they are in control of the storytelling that surrounds players and their interactions. But should designers also be in control of the storytelling of the data games generate from players’ interactions? We argue that game designers already are in multiple ways, and that this role is unavoidable. When game designers decide how to represent game data, they inherently must decide on a select number of representations. Although raw data can be provided to users, that raw data has to take some initial form which makes certain types of analysis more convenient, and other types less convenient. Using rehabilitation games as an example, we discuss the dilemma of storytelling in data-generating games and outline three areas for further research.