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Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom: Using Computer Games

Full Text: digra.pdf PDF

ABSTRACT Interactive story writing is a new medium for creative expression. The story “writer” uses a computer game (such as BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights) to create an interactive story where the “reader” is an active participant. The state of the art is that the story (plot, character behaviors, character interactions, conversations, etc.) is specified by writing scripts. Unfortunately, scripting is too low level for non-programmers. ScriptEase is a tool for writing interactive stories in roleplaying games that frees the author from doing explicit computer programming. Stories are created by selecting and customizing familiar patterns. From this specification, ScriptEase automatically generates Neverwinter Nights scripting code. To test the usability of ScriptEase, the tool has been used as an aid to help with the short story unit of a Grade 10 Alberta high school English curriculum. This paper describes ScriptEase and reports on our experience in using it in the classroom.

Citation

M. Carbonaro, M. Cutimisu, M. McNaughton, C. Onuczko, T. Roy, J. Schaeffer, D. Szafron, S. Gillis, S. Kratchmer. "Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom: Using Computer Games". Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA), pp 323-328, January 2005.

Keywords: Interactive story writing, scripting, role-playing games, Neverwinter Nights, machine learning
Category: In Conference

BibTeX

@incollection{Carbonaro+al:DIGRA05,
  author = {Mike Carbonaro and Maria Cutimisu and Matthew McNaughton and Curtis
    Onuczko and Thomas Roy and Jonathan Schaeffer and Duane Szafron and
    Stephanie Gillis and Sabrina Kratchmer},
  title = {Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom: Using Computer Games},
  Pages = {323-328},
  booktitle = {Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA)},
  year = 2005,
}

Last Updated: March 07, 2007
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