Graphics, Imaging, and Games Lab

At the beginning of October, Andrew Wallace and I will be participating in a digital narrative workshop for the GRAND NCE called 'Experiencing Stories with/in Digital Games.' The following abstract describes the round table talk I'll be giving as part of the student gathering:

Non-linear fiction ranges from the use of static plots with events presented in a non-chronological way to interactive story worlds where users make choices that affect the outcome of the story. A wide range of media can be used to implement works of non-linear fiction, including novels, film, storytelling engines, and games. In all of these cases, there are multiple techniques available for designing and telling a non-linear story.

We have compiled a taxonomy for these techniques with broad categories for strategies for explaining non-linearity, structuring stories as graphs, relying on emergent behaviour, creating character driven plots, and designing data-driven interactive worlds. Each of these categories breaks down further with classic examples from all types of media and with approaches reported on in academic literature. For instance, a strategy to explain a story’s non-linearity is to attribute it to time travel (The Legend of Zelda: Orcarina of Time) or to a hallucinating or brain-damaged character (Memento). Many examples use a simple branching structure to change the story based on player choices (Choose Your Own Adventure) while others rely on game data to adjust how other characters in the story react to you (Fallout 3).

In this talk, we will present our taxonomy and frame it in the context of story in games. We will discuss what techniques have been used in existing games, and which have not yet been employed. We will consider why games have not used certain techniques, and use this to suggest how they might do so in the future.

Gamification is a hot topic these days, and even educational games probably can't escape it.  In fact, this popular Extra Credits video took it a step further and suggested how we might improve all of education by considering lessons from game design:

The Escapist : Extra Credits : Gamifying Education

But, as you might imagine, there is a big divide in opinion on gamification.  Check out Sebastian Deterding's Coding Conduct post on his keynote presentation, Don't Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design.  The slides from his talk are embedded below and are worth reading through.

From my personal blog:

Imagine finding yourself in the front foyer of what is probably a haunted mansion with a few of your closest friends. There's no way out, since the front door is locked (naturally).  You begin to explore the house, discovering one new room at a time.  You might run into some unexpected circumstances, halting your exploration temporarily, or find some items that might be useful to you later.

Read the rest of the post and find out how this game fared in the interactive storytelling department.

From my personal blog:

Story in games. Something we seem to be trying for, but continue to struggle with. Perhaps it's even worse for educational games: we are told that narrative engages learners and helps to situate content, but it's not clear whether we need a full fledged story instead of just a little bit of fiction to accomplish our goals. Worse, get it wrong, and your audience could see through it and dismiss the whole idea since they know you have an educational agenda.

Read the rest of the article here.

From my personal blog:

My mind has been occupied by narrative lately. I've been surveying literature about non-linear / interactive narrative and storytelling with the goal of eventually coming up with new strategies for piecing together story fragments in an interactive story. In particular, I'm interested in how this could help in the context of educational games where designers have a specific learning objective in mind.

Since my husband and I have been working through L.A. Noire lately (which I love!), I've been thinking about how linear the story has been (especially for an interactive video game).

Read the rest of this post...

I just got back from New York City for my first visit to the Games for Change Festival. In its eighth year, this year’s festival was held on June 20-22 at New York University.  I wasn’t able to attend the entire conference, but thanks to live streaming I caught most of the Tuesday talks I would have missed otherwise.  (You can watch the archives of the live stream, too!)

I wrote a complete blog post summarizing the event on my own blog, which was also syndicated on BlogHer, which I encourage you to check out.

Here are some other great resources to learn more about the event:

• Livestream video archives
• My (very) rough live notes
• Games for Change: Jesse Schell Keynote
• Video of Jesse Schell's Keynote
• Al Gore champions gaming at Games for Change
• Games for Change 2011: Furniture Forest
• Games for Change 2011: Public Media and Games
• 10 Good Minutes with Dan White of Filament Games

Since I was finally able to concentrate on my Story Quest project in the last couple of weeks, I now have a fully working prototype.  I created a little example game with a Zelda theme using objects and locations within my own house.

The general story idea is that you have just volunteered to battle the monsters that have been terrorizing your town's cattle herds. You first have to equip yourself with a shield (found in the wooden box) and ask the local swordsmith to create you a weapon.  The swordsmith needs you to find a certain set of materials, leading you through a mini-scavenger hunt where each clue leads you to a related real-world object (such as tinfoil for the metal to create the sword out of). Once equipped, you are off the find the mother beast and slay her (I used clues related to our cat to help the player find the correct locations).  You have a choice in terms of where you look for her, and each path is slightly different.

I asked my husband Andrew to play the game last night.  Through observing him and asking him about it afterwards, I learned the following:

• Multiplayer would make the game a lot more interesting on a larger scale (while he enjoyed the prototype well enough, he had all kinds of ideas for similar games with both collaboration and competition, and was most excited about those).
• The QR code library worked really, really well.  Andrew admitted to purposely making it difficult, but the scanner managed to read the codes most of the time.  Only when the image got unreasonably blurry from movement or low light did it fail.  (I am using the ZBar bar code reader library, so kudos to them!)
• I thought the UI for the prototype might have garnered some complaints, but it did not.  I worried there were too many button pushes to go from the main story node to a scavenger hunt list to an individual item to the code scanning, but that didn't seem to be a problem at all.
• Andrew said that the existence of QR codes in places they wouldn't normally be changed the way he looked for the next location or item.  Still, when I observed him, he really did use the clue to figure out where to go - whether there was a code there only confirmed whether he was right.  An approach without codes (i.e. based on location or natural feature recognition) might help alleviate this, but whether you want to may depend on the goals of the game (or even one part of the game).
• Related to this, Andrew felt that the story and reality were fairly separate since the objects were not represented exactly in the story (even if they had a fairly close mapping).  I figure this isn't necessarily a bad thing - it again depends on what the goals of the game are.

Based on all this, it looks like the main considerations at this point are more related to content than technology.  However, to make multiplayer a reality, I will need to do some code redesign, so that's what I'm working on now.  I'm planning on adding the concept of teams, player roles, and virtual items.

Originally posted on my personal blog.

I just downloaded this intriguing iPhone app: Inception the App.  I haven't tried it yet, but based on some commentary I've seen on Twitter and on reading the website, this might just be the coolest audio augmented reality application I've heard of to date.

Hans Zimmer talks about Inception The App from RjDj on Vimeo.

A team made of members from this lab has just submitted a game called Gram's House for the first round of Microsoft's Imagine Cup 2011.  Check out the game video below.

This TED Talk by MIT's Cynthia Breazeal is full of really neat stuff.  Near the end, she talks about a newer project that creates a play space for children using robots and mixed reality.  I'm not sure if the main purpose is for learning, but you can easily see how that would fit in.  I found this project pretty inspiring.