Story and Simulations for Serious Games

Book description

How to create a simulation where participants have a sense of freedom and personal control while still maintaining the structure necessary for an effective story is a difficult task indeed. This book examines how to create an engaging, effective story (necessary to teach participants), while relating practical considerations of building a simulation. It also looks at stories as classic ways of teaching and gathering knowledge and considers other theories of interactive narrative design such as synthetic story creation and management and participant-generated story experiences. It also discusses enabling technologies in artificial intelligence, synthetic characters design and development, speech recognition technology, 3D modelling, and the future of story-driven games. Story Driven Simulations reviews the existing efforts in this field as well as focusing on the recent efforts of Paramount Pictures and The Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where this expert author team created successful simulations for the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, as well as other educational simulations.

Table of contents

  1. Front Cover
  2. Half Title
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Acknowledgements
  7. Table of Contents
  8. Introduction (The Road to StoryDrive.)
  9. 1. Who This Book is For
  10. Part One: Case Studies
    1. 2. The StoryDrive Engine
    2. 3. Collaborative Distance Learning
    3. 4. Branching Storylines
  11. Part Two: Stories And Story Development
    1. 5. A Good Story (The Simple Answer)
    2. 6. Other Perspectives on Story
    3. 7. War Stories and Parables
    4. 8. Designing Simulation Stories from Tacit Knowledge 53 (The theory behind story-based serious games.)
    5. 9. Simulation Stories and Free Play
    6. 10. Experience Management
    7. 11. Story Representation in Experience Management
  12. Part Three: Characters
    1. 12. Creating Multidimensional Characters
    2. 13. A Really Good Villain
    3. 14. Synthetic Characters
  13. Part Four: Man in the Loop vs. The Automated Game Manager
    1. 15. The Instructor as Dungeon Master
    2. 16. Automated Story Generation
  14. Part Five: Completing The Pyramid
    1. 17. Game Play
    2. 18. Evaluation and Testing
  15. Part Six: Building The Immersive Environment
    1. 19. Content Scripting Tools
    2. 20. Selecting Media and Platform: An Overview
    3. 21. Immersive Desktop Experiences
    4. 22. The Internet
    5. 23. Interactive Video and Interactive Television
    6. 24. Real-Time 3D Virtual Worlds
    7. 25. Audio
    8. 26. Simulation Integration
  16. Part Seven: Story Structures For Commercial Games
    1. 27. Back Story and Free Play
    2. 28. Stories in State-of-the-Art Serious Games
    3. 29. Stories in State-of-the-Art Commercial Games
  17. Part Eight: The Future Of Story-Driven Games
    1. 30. The Future: The Role of Story
      1. a. Immersive Distance Learning Experiences
      2. b. Online Collaborative Games and Simulations
      3. c. Story-Driven Massively Multiplayer Online Games
      4. d. Location-Based Full-Sensory Simulations (Virtual Reality)
      5. e. Keeping Track of the Evolution
      6. f. Summary
    2. 31. Conclusion
  18. Bibliography
  19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Story and Simulations for Serious Games
  • Author(s): Nick Iuppa, Terry Borst
  • Release date: July 2012
  • Publisher(s): Routledge
  • ISBN: 9781136142772